Path Regeneration for Interactive Path Tracing

Abstract

Rendering of photo-realistic images at interactive frame rates is currently an extensively researched area of computer graphics.Many of these approaches attempt to utilize the computational power of modern graphics hardware for ray tracing based methods. When using path tracing algorithms the ray paths are highly incoherent, hence we propose an efficient technique that minimizes the divergence in execution flow and ensures full utilization by intelligently regenerating the paths. We analyze the conditions under which our improvements provide the highest speedup, and demonstrate the performance of the overall system by rendering interactive previews of global illumination solutions using (bidirectional) path tracing with progressive refinement.Rendering of photo-realistic images at interactive frame rates is currently an extensively researched area of computer graphics.Many of these approaches attempt to utilize the computational power of modern graphics hardware for ray tracing based methods. When using path tracing algorithms the ray paths are highly incoherent, hence we propose an efficient technique that minimizes the divergence in execution flow and ensures full utilization by intelligently regenerating the paths. We analyze the conditions under which our improvements provide the highest speedup, and demonstrate the performance of the overall system by rendering interactive previews of global illumination solutions using (bidirectional) path tracing with progressive refinement.