Haven’t read the full paper yet but SWRT research from Nvidia shouldn’t be surprising. They’ve been doing that for ages leading up to Optix etc.
Intro is interesting:
“It is generally believed that employing ray tracing over rasterization is the key to achieving photorealism, which is provably easier and more consistent to simulate global shading effects such ambient occlusion and indirect illumination. However, with only hardware ray tracing (HWRT) using specific hardware acceleration support, one can barely achieve real-time frame rates. More crucially, even today, only high-end platforms support HWRT. So we still need a HWRT alternative, software ray tracing (SWRT) solution, as a reasonable approximation to HWRT for providing users with the option to scale down: allowing trade- offs between quality and performance for low-end platforms, e.g., mobile devices and VR headsets.”
Intro is interesting:
“It is generally believed that employing ray tracing over rasterization is the key to achieving photorealism, which is provably easier and more consistent to simulate global shading effects such ambient occlusion and indirect illumination. However, with only hardware ray tracing (HWRT) using specific hardware acceleration support, one can barely achieve real-time frame rates. More crucially, even today, only high-end platforms support HWRT. So we still need a HWRT alternative, software ray tracing (SWRT) solution, as a reasonable approximation to HWRT for providing users with the option to scale down: allowing trade- offs between quality and performance for low-end platforms, e.g., mobile devices and VR headsets.”
