Adoption of Sparse 3D Textures for Voxel Cone Tracing in Real Time Global Illumination

Igor Aherne, Richard Davison, Gary Ushaw, Graham Morgan

Abstract: The enhancement of 3D scenes using indirect illumination brings increased realism. As indirect illumination is computationally expensive, significant research effort has been made in lowering resource requirements while maintaining fidelity. State-of-the-art approaches, such as voxel cone tracing, exploit the parallel nature of the GPU to achieve real-time solutions. However, such approaches require bespoke GPU code which is not tightly aligned to the graphics pipeline in hardware. This results in a reduced ability to leverage the latest dedicated GPU hardware graphics techniques. In this paper we present a solution that utilises GPU supported sparse 3D texture maps. In doing so we provide an engineered solution that is more integrated with the latest GPU hardware than existing approaches to indirect illumination. We demonstrate that our approach not only provides a more optimal solution, but will benefit from the planned future enhancements of sparse 3D texture support expected in G