Toward Practical Real-Time Photon Mapping: Efficient GPU Density Estimation
NVIDIA
Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, 2013
@inproceedings{Mara13Photon,
author={Michael Mara and Morgan McGuire and David Luebke},
title={Toward Practical Real-Time Photon Mapping: Efficient GPU Density Estimation},
month={March},
year={2013},
booktitle={Interactive 3D Graphics and Games 2013},
location={Orlando, Florida},
url={http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/PhotonI3D13/}
}
We describe the design space for real-time photon density estimation, the key step of rendering global illumination (GI) via photon mapping. We then detail and analyze efficient GPU implementations of four best-of-breed algorithms. All produce reasonable results on NVIDIA GeForce 670 at 1920×1080 for complex scenes with multiple-bounce diffuse effects, caustics, and glossy reflection in real-time. Across the designs we conclude that tiled, deferred photon gathering in a compute shader gives the best combination of performance and quality.
January 13, 2013 by hgpu
