high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Volumetric light scattering is a complex phenomenon that is difficult to simulate in real time as light can be scattered towards the camera from everywhere in space. By assuming a single-scattering model, we can transform the usually-employed ray-marching into an efficient ray-independent texture filtering process. Our algorithm builds upon a rectified shadow map as input and we propose an efficient rectification scheme, which could be used by other approaches as well. The resulting scattering method is very fast and almost independent of the screen resolution, but it still produces near-reference results. These properties make it a good candidate for performance-critical applications, such as games.