Importance Sampling of Many Light on the GPU

Pierre Moreau
NVIDIA
Lund University

Petrik Clarberg
NVIDIA

Ray Tracing Gems

Abstract

The introduction of standardized APIs for ray tracing, together with hardware acceleration, opens up possibilities for physically based lighting in real-time rendering. Light importance sampling is one of the fundamental operations in light transport simulations, applicable to both direct and indirect illumination. This chapter describes a bounding volume hierarchy data structure and associated sampling methods to accelerate importance sampling of local light sources. The work is based on recently published methods for light sampling in production rendering, but it is evaluated in a real-time implementation using Microsoft DirectX Raytracing.

News

  • 2022-01-13: Fixes to the BibTeX entry.
  • 2021-11-24: Tweaks to the BibTeX entry.
  • 2020-01-30: Initial upload.

Downloads

Paper
BibTeX entry
@Inbook{ Moreau2019,
  author        = {Moreau, Pierre and Clarberg, Petrik},
  title         = {Importance Sampling of Many Lights on the {GPU}},
  pages         = {255–283},
  DOI           = {10.1007/978-1-4842-4427-2_18},

  editor        = {Haines, Eric and Akenine-M{\"o}ller, Tomas},
  publisher     = {Apress},
  address       = {Berkeley, {CA}, {USA}},
  bookTitle     = {Ray Tracing Gems: High-Quality and Real-Time Rendering with {DXR} and Other {APIs}},
  year          = {2019},
  ISBN          = {978-1-4842-4427-2}
}
Code
Part of Falcor's 4.0 release.

See also