The Games Summit at SIGGRAPH 2026 is a deliberate widening of the lens, with many sessions covering the convergence of film and games, from performance capture to shared file formats. 

SIGGRAPH 2026, taking place 19–23 July 2026 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, will open with the Games Summit, a new one-day track dedicated to game developers and enthusiasts. Held on Sunday, 19 July, the Games Summit brings together leading studios and indies for a day of talks and networking focused on how games are made and where the medium is headed. 

For its 53rd annual conference SIGGRAPH debuts a curated day of games programming , spanning accessibility, audio, performance capture, and the economics of modern games development, with games content running all week. The organizers say that the Games Summit is “a deliberate widening of the lens”, because “alongside the technical, real-time rendering-focused conversations SIGGRAPH is known for, it makes room for the broader questions facing game teams today.” 

“SIGGRAPH is renowned for deep technical insights, and that isn’t going anywhere. This year’s games programming expands the scope with broader topics game developers are wrestling with right now,” said Emily Hsu, SIGGRAPH 2026 Games Chair. She notes that SIGGRAPH is known as the world’s premier conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, a category games squarely occupy. 

The Games Summit runs from morning to evening on opening day and covers a deliberately broad range of topics, including accessibility, audio, visual effects, performance capture, pipelines, and the overall state of gaming. 

Among the multiple sessions there is a Computer Animation Festival Animation Theater session that spotlights how games and cinematics work, before “Performance Capture at Scale: Building a Pipeline for Battlefield 6 Cinematics”, in which Pasha Sol from Electronic Arts details how EA Create Capture adapted film-grade virtual production to the pace and scale of AAA development. 

The convergence of film and games runs throughout the Games Summit, from performance capture to shared file formats. The day’s closing “The OpenUSD Roundtable: Using an Open Source File Format in Film and Game Dev Pipelines” makes that convergence literal, seating film and game developers at the same table to work through a file format that now moves across both pipelines, while “Performance Capture at Scale: Building a Pipeline for Battlefield 6 Cinematics” shows EA Create Capture carrying film-grade virtual production techniques onto a AAA game stage for Battlefield 6 cinematics. 

“We’re already seeing game cinematic pipelines leaning heavily on filmmaking techniques, and film pipelines being built on game engines so the lines aren’t blurred. They’re gone,” Hsu said. “What matters now is hybrid fluency in both. Those who have it can expand their toolkit and build the right pipeline for the project in front of them.” 

Hsu continues, “That’s the spirit of SIGGRAPH. There are no wins from hoarding information or existing in an echo chamber of a single way of working. We advance across industries and as studios if we’re actually sharing, cross-pollinating, and learning from each other.” 

For Hsu, the goal is straightforward. “My hope is that game devs leave Sunday’s Games Summit feeling like they’ve already made great connections and experienced something worthwhile — and then realize the conference week is just getting started. The Games Summit stands on its own, but it is also part of a larger conference that brings together researchers, artists, and technologists who solve problems in ways that might surprise them. For those who can make the week of it, there’s a lot more where that came from.”