A Distributed, Decoupled System for Losslessly Streaming Dynamic Light Probes to Thin Clients

Abstract

We present a networked, high-performance graphics system that combines dynamic, high-quality, ray traced global illumination computed on a server with direct illumination and primary visibility computed on a client. This approach provides many of the image quality benefits of real-time ray tracing on low-power and legacy hardware, while maintaining a low latency response and mobile form factor.As opposed to streaming full frames from rendering servers to end clients, our system distributes the graphics pipeline over a network by computing diffuse global illumination on a remote machine. Diffuse global illumination is computed using a recent irradiance volume representation combined with a new lossless, HEVC-based, hardware-accelerated encoding, and a perceptually-motivated update scheme.Our experimental implementation streams thousands of irradiance probes per second and requires less than 50 Mbps of throughput, reducing the consumed bandwidth by 99.4 % when streaming at 60 Hz compared to traditional lossless texture compression.The bandwidth reduction achieved with our approach allows higher quality and lower latency graphics than state-of-the-art remote rendering via video streaming. In addition, our split-rendering solution decouples remote computation from local rendering and so does not limit local display update rate or display resolution.

Type
Publication
Proceedings of the 12th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference, 2021