a new article From Intel, he discusses the latest advances in path-traced light simulation and neural graphics research that engineers at the company have been working on. One of the biggest improvements Intel is aiming for is a much more efficient boost to path tracing rendering, which will allow real-time path tracing on integrated GPUs.
This article links to three new papers promoting new path tracing optimizations presented at SIGGRAPH, EGSR, and HPG by the Intel Graphics Research Organization. These optimizations are designed to reduce and improve GPU performance by reducing the number of computations required to simulate light reflections.
The first presented paper presents a new method to calculate the reflection on the GGX microfacet surface. GGX is a graphics technology that allows computers to simulate and capture reflections of light reflected in different directions. This new method “shrinks” the material to a hemispherical mirror, making the simulation much easier.
A second paper presents a more efficient method of rendering glossy surfaces in a 3D environment. According to Intel, simulating glossy surfaces is an “unsolved issue.” However, this new method can take into account the average number of glitter visible from each pixel. That way the GPU only needs to render the right amount of visible glitter.
Finally, another paper presents a more efficient method of constructing photographic trajectories in different lighting scenarios, known as Markov chain mixture models for real-time direct lighting. It’s very complicated to explain, but the end result is a more efficient rendering technique for outputting complex direct lighting in real time.
These three techniques obviously do not guarantee that an integrated GPU can perform path tracing smoothly. However, according to Intel, these are aimed at improving the core parts of path tracing such as ray tracing, shading and sampling, and help improve real-time path tracing performance on integrated GPUs (discrete GPUs as well). .
Getting real-time light simulation to work effectively on the integrated GPU would be a major milestone. Real-time ray tracing has technically been around since 2018, but it still requires a lot of processing power to run. Most of the world’s best GPUs can’t enable ray-traced graphics to run modern AAA games at high resolutions and 60FPS. If Intel can get path tracing working properly with their integrated graphics solutions, the technology will go mainstream, making it easier to run light simulations even on discrete GPUs.
