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Progressive Light Transport Simulation on the GPU: Survey and Improvements

Published: 02 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) recently became general enough to enable implementation of a variety of light transport algorithms. However, the efficiency of these GPU implementations has received relatively little attention in the research literature and no systematic study on the topic exists to date. The goal of our work is to fill this gap. Our main contribution is a comprehensive and in-depth investigation of the efficiency of the GPU implementation of a number of classic as well as more recent progressive light transport simulation algorithms. We present several improvements over the state-of-the-art. In particular, our light vertex cache, a new approach to mapping connections of subpath vertices in bidirectional path tracing on the GPU, outperforms the existing implementations by 30--60%. We also describe a first GPU implementation of the recently introduced vertex connection and merging algorithm [Georgiev et al. 2012], showing that even relatively complex light transport algorithms can be efficiently mapped on the GPU. With the implementation of many of the state-of-the-art algorithms within a single system at our disposal, we present a unique direct comparison and analysis of their relative performance.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
    ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 33, Issue 3
    May 2014
    145 pages
    ISSN:0730-0301
    EISSN:1557-7368
    DOI:10.1145/2631978
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 02 June 2014
    Accepted: 01 February 2014
    Revised: 01 December 2013
    Received: 01 June 2013
    Published in TOG Volume 33, Issue 3

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    Author Tags

    1. GPU
    2. Global illumination
    3. bidirectional path tracing
    4. high performance
    5. vertex connection and merging

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