During the workday, Roman Timurson often jumps behind the wheel, floors it, and does a lap around the track. Just as often, he crashes.
“It’s so easy to spin out, the cars are so realistic,” he grins, nodding toward his trusty Logitech G29 racing wheel and pedals — essential tools of the trade for testing updates at his job.
For nearly four years, Timurson has brought his deep programming and graphics skills to iRacing, the franchise widely regarded as one of the most realistic motorsport simulators on the market. The sim’s detail is so precise that many professional NASCAR drivers regularly use it to train.
“I’ll see chatter on Slack about Dale Earnhardt Jr. sending emails saying we’re doing a great job,” Timurson says. “We have one physics guy dedicated just to tires, and we also do laser geometry scanning of all the real-world race tracks, even down to the outhouses!”
Timurson’s road to iRacing began with two laps at DigiPen, first as an undergrad, then more than a decade later as a graduate student. A 2007 graduate of the BS in Computer Science in Real-Time Interactive Simulation program, Timurson arrived at DigiPen with minimal programming experience, but a passion for math. “Computer graphics just kind of clicked for me when I started at DigiPen,” he says.
Right out of school, Timurson landed a job offer in San Francisco from Havok, a software company known for its game physics engines and AI navigation tech. But instead of relocating, he chose to stay closer to family in Reno, Nevada, taking a role at IGT developing games for the casino industry. “No matter where I would have gone for any real-time interactive job, already having so much graphics experience from DigiPen helped a lot,” he says.
Though the job used his graphics skills, the mostly 2D nature of casino games left him craving more after 12 years. “I wanted to level up my graphics skills and learn more advanced physically based rendering (PBR) techniques, the latest thing in the industry,” he says. “So, going back to DigiPen for my master’s was natural. It was totally worth it.”
Returning in 2018 for the MS in Computer Science program, Timurson specialized in graphics and physics, immersing himself in the latest hyperrealistic rendering techniques. “I had read about PBR theory, but in Gary Herron’s class I got to really dive deep, understand it, and take all the time to implement it in projects,” he says.
Since hyperrealism is the name of the game at iRacing, the company recruited Timurson shortly after graduating, where he quickly got up to speed as their newest software engineer working at the forefront of 3D graphics. “The difference between us and console racing sims like Gran Turismo is that our customers like to feel like they’re in the cockpit, so they will spend a lot on their racing rigs and run triple monitors,” Timurson says. “Triple monitors is a lot of pixels, so performance is a big challenge.”
For iRacing’s devoted players, frames per second (FPS) counters matter as much as speedometers do to real drivers. “We allow our customers to run with uncapped framerates, and they like to see it go up to 120, 140 FPS. If enabling a graphics effect tanks that by even 30 FPS, they will notice,” Timurson says. “A lot of my work is about balancing the need to deliver a good-looking sim experience, but also make it run well for anywhere from one to three monitors, or a VR headset.”
Since iRacing has been evolving for over 16 years, bringing its graphics up to modern standards often means updating large swaths of legacy code. “Sometimes you inherit somebody else’s code, and if you understand it well enough, you just become the new go-to guy to support it,” Timurson says.
Coming in hungry to put his advanced new rendering skills to work, Timurson quickly found himself becoming the “go-to guy” supporting and updating a wide range of graphical effects, including screen space ambient occlusion, a technique used to create soft shadows and depth in post-processing. “I decided that was the first thing I wanted to tackle. It was really fun to dive into the engine and take the time to get that optimized and improved.”
Understanding the math, 3D transformations, how shaders work — once you get those from DigiPen, it’s easy no matter where you go.
Timurson’s contributions have extended far beyond graphics. He’s collaborated with animators to modernize their scripting tools, improved on a procedural system for generating 3D curbs, and is currently implementing iRacing’s soon-to-launch new user interface system, Noesis. “It’s actually the same system that Baldur’s Gate III uses,” he says. “We’re polishing it up right now, and I’m very proud of where it’s at.”
Despite nearly four years at iRacing, Timurson says he’s still learning the ropes when it comes to racing rules and motorsport terminology. “For Noesis, I dove into the code trying to understand all the penalties that a car can get flagged for. I was amazed how many real real-world penalty scenarios there are. I’m still figuring out what they all mean,” he laughs.
While he may still be learning the finer points of racing, Timurson says his DigiPen education has him feeling right at home behind the wheel at work. “Going to DigiPen, I was really well prepared for iRacing,” Timurson says. “Understanding the math, 3D transformations, how shaders work — once you get those from DigiPen, it’s easy no matter where you go.”