Foveated Real-Time Path Tracing in Visual-Polar Space
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Date
2019
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
Computing power is still the limiting factor in photorealistic real-time rendering. Foveated rendering improves perceived quality by focusing the rendering effort on where the user is looking at. Applying foveated rendering to real-time path tracing where we must work on a very small number of samples per pixel introduces additional challenges; the rendering result is thoroughly noisy and sparse in the periphery. In this paper we demonstrate foveated real-time path tracing system and propose a novel Visual-Polar space in which both real-time path tracing and denoising is done before mapping to screen space. When path tracing a regular grid of samples in Visual-Polar space, the screen space sample distribution follows the human visual acuity model, making both the rendering and denoising 2:5x faster with similar perceived quality. In addition, when using Visual- Polar space, primary rays stay more coherent, leading to improved utilization of the GPU resources and, therefore, making ray traversal 1.3 - 1.5x faster. Moreover, Visual-Polar space improves 1 sample per pixel denoising quality in the fovea. We show that Visual-Polar based path tracing enables real-time rendering for contemporary virtual reality devices even without dedicated ray tracing hardware acceleration.
Description
@inproceedings{10.2312:sr.20191219,
booktitle = {Eurographics Symposium on Rendering - DL-only and Industry Track},
editor = {Boubekeur, Tamy and Sen, Pradeep},
title = {{Foveated Real-Time Path Tracing in Visual-Polar Space}},
author = {Koskela, Matias and Lotvonen, Atro and Mäkitalo, Markku and Kivi, Petrus and Viitanen, Timo and Jääskeläinen, Pekka},
year = {2019},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1727-3463},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-095-6},
DOI = {10.2312/sr.20191219}
}