We introduce the Symmetric GGX (SGGX) distribution to represent spatially-varying properties of anisotropic microflake participating media. Our key theoretical insight is to represent a microflake distribution by the projected area of the microflakes. We use the projected area to parameterize the shape of an ellipsoid, from which we recover a distribution of normals.

Variation has been shown to exist across the cells within a modern DRAM chip. Prior work has studied and exploited several forms of variation, such as manufacturing-process- or temperature-induced variation. We empirically demonstrate a new form of variation that exists within a real DRAM chip, induced by the design and placement of different components in the DRAM chip: different regions in DRAM, based on their relative distances from the peripheral structures, require different minimum access latencies for reliable operation.

We present a new approach to finding ray–cubic Bézier curve intersections by leveraging recent achievements in polynomial studies. Compared with the state-of-the-art adaptive linearization, it increases performance by 5–50 times, while also improving the accuracy by 1000X. Our algorithm quickly eliminates parts of the curve for which the distance to the given ray is guaranteed to be bigger than a model-specific threshold (maximum curve’s half-width).

We present a machine learning technique for driving 3D facial animation by audio input in real time and with low latency. Our deep neural network learns a mapping from input waveforms to the 3D vertex coordinates of a face model, and simultaneously discovers a compact, latent code that disambiguates the variations in facial expression that cannot be explained by the audio alone. During inference, the latent code can be used as an intuitive control for the emotional state of the face puppet.

We introduce a reconstruction algorithm that generates a temporally stable sequence of images from one path-per-pixel global illumination. To handle such noisy input, we use temporal accumulation to increase the effective sample count and spatiotemporal luminance variance estimates to drive a hierarchical, image-space wavelet filter. This hierarchy allows us to distinguish between noise and detail at multiple scales using local luminance variance. Physically based light transport is a long-standing goal for real-time computer graphics.

When generating a set of uniformly distributed lines through a square, some care is needed to avoid bias in line orientation and position. We present a compact algorithm to generate unbiased uniformly distributed lines from a uniform point set over the unit square.

Order independent transparency (OIT) proves challenging for modern rasterization-based renderers. Rendering without transparency can limit the quality of visual effects, so researchers have proposed various algorithms enabling and approximating OIT. Unfortunately, this work generally has restrictions limiting its applicability. To identify directions for improvement, we performed an in-depth categorization of existing transparency techniques and placed them on a multi-dimensional continuum.

Accelerators, such as GPUs, have proven to be highly successful in reducing execution time and power con- sumption of compute-intensive applications. Even though they are already used pervasively, they are typically supervised by general-purpose CPUs, which results in frequent control flow switches and data transfers as CPUs are handling all communication tasks. However, we observe that accelerators are recently being augmented with peer-to-peer communication capabilities that allow for autonomous traffic sourcing and sinking.

Historically, improvements in GPU-based high performance computing have been tightly coupled to transistor scaling. As Moore's law slows down, and the number of transistors per die no longer grows at historical rates, the performance curve of single monolithic GPUs will ultimately plateau. However, the need for higher performing GPUs continues to exist in many domains. To address this need, in this paper we demonstrate that package-level integration of multiple GPU modules to build larger logical GPUs can enable continuous performance scaling beyond Moore's law.

In this paper, we present a simple and efficient method for training deep neural networks in a semi-supervised setting where only a small portion of training data is labeled. We introduce self-ensembling, where we form a consensus prediction of the unknown labels using the outputs of the network-in-training on different epochs, and most importantly, under different regularization and input augmentation conditions.