Deep G-Buffers for Stable Global Illumination Approximation

We introduce a new hardware-accelerated method for constructing Deep G-buffers that is 2x-8x faster than the previous depth peeling method and produces more stable results. We then build several high-performance shading algorithms atop our representation, including dynamic diffuse interreflection, ambient occlusion (AO), and mirror reflection effects.

Our construction method s order-independent, guarantees a minimum separation between layers, operates in a (small) bounded memory footprint, and does not require per-pixel sorting. Moreover, addressing the increasingly expensive cost of pre-rasterization, our approach requires only a single pass over the scene geometry. Our global illumination algorithms approach the speed of the fastest screen-space AO-only techniques while significantly exceeding their quality: we capture small-scale details and complex radiometric effects more robustly than screen-space techniques, and we implicitly handle dynamic illumination conditions. We include the pseudocode for our Deep G-buffer construction in the paper and the full source code of our technique in our supplemental document.

Authors

Michael Mara (NVIDIA)
Morgan McGuire (NVIDIA)
Derek Nowrouzezahrai (University of Montreal)

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