A Voxel Renderer for Learning C/C++

February 1, 2021 Coding Source Code Tutorial No Comments
This article describes the construction and optimization of a voxel map renderer. The renderer is designed to run on the GPU, while the CPU is used to update the map for the next frame. It turns out that such a renderer can reach up to 1 billion rays per second…

OPT#4:SIMD (part 2 of 2)

May 18, 2020 Article Coding Tutorial 3 Comments
In the previous post I introduced the concept of single instruction, multiple data using 4 bytes in a 32-bit unsigned integer, and using Intel’s SSE instructions. Using SSE instructions, a sequence of so-called vector instructions operates on four instances of a single scalar flow. Take the following simple example: vec3…

OPT#3:SIMD (part 1 of 2)

May 12, 2020 Coding Tutorial 1 Comment
This is the third article in the series of posts on Optimization, which accompany online lectures for the IGAD program of the Breda University of Applied Sciences. You can find the first post (on profiling) here. The second post, on low level optimization, introduced the Rules of Engagement, which can…

Optimizing Trilinear Interpolation

April 10, 2020 Article Coding 8 Comments
This is going to be a short post. It is about a function that is heavily used in the Lighthouse 2 renderer: FetchTexelTrilinear, which can be found in sampling_shared.h. It roughly looks like this: float4 FetchTexelTrilinear( float lambda, float2 uv, int offset, int width, int height ) { int level0…

Speeding Up Lighthouse 2

April 7, 2020 Article Coding 3 Comments
Last week an updated version of the Lighthouse 2 benchmark was released. This version is about 15% faster, and produces images with less noise. In fact, rendering 10 paths per pixels (samples per pixel, or spp) takes as long as it took the February 27 version of the benchmark to…

Probability Theory for Physically Based Rendering

December 11, 2019 Article Tutorial 18 Comments
Introduction Rendering frequently involves the evaluation of multidimensional definite integrals: e.g., the visibility of an area light, radiance arriving over the area of a pixel, radiance arriving over a period of time, and the irradiance arriving over the hemisphere of a surface point. Evaluation of these integrals is typically done…

Wavefront Path Tracing

July 18, 2019 Article 5 Comments
Introduction In this article we will explore an important concept used in the recently published Lighthouse 2 platform. Wavefront path tracing, as it is called by NVIDIA’s Laine, Karras and Aila, or streaming path tracing, as it was originally named by Van Antwerpen in his master’s thesis, plays a crucial…