Browsing by Author "Steinberger, Markus"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Clouds in the Cloud: Efficient Cloud-Based Rendering of Real-Time Volumetric Clouds
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Weinrauch, Alexander; Lorbek, Stephan; Tatzgern, Wolfgang; Stadlbauer, Pascal; Steinberger, Markus; Bikker, Jacco; Gribble, Christiaan
    Volumetric clouds play a crucial role in creating realistic, dynamic, and immersive virtual outdoor environments. However, rendering volumetric clouds in real-time presents a significant computational challenge on end-user devices. In this paper, we investigate the viability of moving computations to remote servers in the cloud and sharing them among many viewers in the same virtual world, without compromising the perceived quality of the final renderings. We propose an efficient rendering method for volumetric clouds and cloud shadows utilizing caches placed in the cloud layers and directly on the surface of objects. Volumetric cloud properties, like density and lightning, are cached on spheres positioned to represent cloud layers at varying heights. Volumetric cloud shadows are cached directly on the surfaces of receiving objects. This allows efficient rendering in scenarios where multiple viewers observe the same cloud formations by sharing redundant calculations and storing them over multiple frames. Due to the placement and structure of our caches, viewers on the ground still perceive plausible parallax under movement on the ground. In a user study, we found that viewers hardly perceive quality reductions even when computations are shared for viewers that are hundreds of meters apart. Due to the smoothness of the appearance of clouds, caching structures can use significantly reduced resolution and as such allow for efficient rendering even in single-viewer scenarios. Our quantitative experiments demonstrate computational cost savings proportional to the number of viewers placed in the scene when relying on our caches compared to traditional rendering.
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    Efficient Rendering of Participating Media for Multiple Viewpoints
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Stojanovic, Robert; Weinrauch, Alexander; Tatzgern, Wolfgang; Kurz, Andreas; Steinberger, Markus; Bikker, Jacco; Gribble, Christiaan
    Achieving realism in modern games requires the integration of participating media effects, such as fog, dust, and smoke. However, due to the complex nature of scattering and partial occlusions within these media, real-time rendering of high-quality participating media remains a computational challenge. To address this challenge, traditional approaches of real-time participating media rendering involve storing temporary results in a view-aligned grid before ray marching through these cached values. In this paper, we investigate alternative hybrid worldand view-aligned caching methods that allow for the sharing of intermediate computations across cameras in a scene. This approach is particularly relevant for multi-camera setups, such as stereo rendering for VR and AR, local split-screen games, or cloud-based rendering for game streaming, where a large number of players may be in the same location. Our approach relies on a view-aligned grid for near-field computations, which enables us to capture high-frequency shadows in front of a viewer. Additionally, we use a world-space caching structure to selectively activate distant computations based on each viewer's visibility, allowing for the sharing of computations and maintaining high visual quality. The results of our evaluation demonstrate computational savings of up to 50% or more, without compromising visual quality.
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    Fast Multi-View Rendering for Real-Time Applications
    (The Eurographics Association, 2020) Unterguggenberger, Johannes; Kerbl, Bernhard; Steinberger, Markus; Schmalstieg, Dieter; Wimmer, Michael; Frey, Steffen and Huang, Jian and Sadlo, Filip
    Efficient rendering of multiple views can be a critical performance factor for real-time rendering applications. Generating more than one view multiplies the amount of rendered geometry, which can cause a huge performance impact. Minimizing that impact has been a target of previous research and GPU manufacturers, who have started to equip devices with dedicated acceleration units. However, vendor-specific acceleration is not the only option to increase multi-view rendering (MVR) performance. Available graphics API features, shader stages and optimizations can be exploited for improved MVR performance, while generally offering more versatile pipeline configurations, including the preservation of custom tessellation and geometry shaders. In this paper, we present an exhaustive evaluation of MVR pipelines available on modern GPUs. We provide a detailed analysis of previous techniques, hardware-accelerated MVR and propose a novel method, leading to the creation of an MVR catalogue. Our analyses cover three distinct applications to help gain clarity on overall MVR performance characteristics. Our interpretation of the observed results provides a guideline for selecting the most appropriate one for various use cases on different GPU architectures.
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    Hierarchical Bucket Queuing for Fine‐Grained Priority Scheduling on the GPU
    (© 2017 The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2017) Kerbl, Bernhard; Kenzel, Michael; Schmalstieg, Dieter; Seidel, Hans‐Peter; Steinberger, Markus; Chen, Min and Zhang, Hao (Richard)
    While the modern graphics processing unit (GPU) offers massive parallel compute power, the ability to influence the scheduling of these immense resources is severely limited. Therefore, the GPU is widely considered to be only suitable as an externally controlled co‐processor for homogeneous workloads which greatly restricts the potential applications of GPU computing. To address this issue, we present a new method to achieve fine‐grained priority scheduling on the GPU: hierarchical bucket queuing. By carefully distributing the workload among multiple queues and efficiently deciding which queue to draw work from next, we enable a variety of scheduling strategies. These strategies include fair‐scheduling, earliest‐deadline‐first scheduling and user‐defined dynamic priority scheduling. In a comparison with a sorting‐based approach, we reveal the advantages of hierarchical bucket queuing over previous work. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of using priority scheduling in real‐world applications by example of path tracing and foveated micropolygon rendering.While the modern graphics processing unit (GPU) offers massive parallel compute power, the ability to influence the scheduling of these immense resources is severely limited. Therefore, the GPU is widely considered to be only suitable as an externally controlled co‐processor for homogeneous workloads which greatly restricts the potential applications of GPU computing. To address this issue, we present a new method to achieve fine‐grained priority scheduling on the GPU: hierarchical bucket queuing. By carefully distributing the workload among multiple queues and efficiently deciding which queue to draw work from next, we enable a variety of scheduling strategies. These strategies include fair‐scheduling, earliest‐deadline‐first scheduling and user‐defined dynamic priority scheduling.
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    High-Performance Graphics 2019 - CGF38-8: Frontmatter
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2019) Steinberger, Markus; Foley, Tim; Steinberger, Markus and Foley, Tim
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    PSAO: Point-Based Split Rendering for Ambient Occlusion
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Neff, Thomas; Budge, Brian; Dong, Zhao; Schmalstieg, Dieter; Steinberger, Markus; Bikker, Jacco; Gribble, Christiaan
    Recent advances in graphics hardware have enabled ray tracing to produce high-quality ambient occlusion (AO) in real-time, which is not plagued by the artifacts typically found in real-time screen-space approaches. However, the high computational cost of ray tracing remains a significant hurdle for low-power devices like standalone VR headsets or smartphones. To address this challenge, inspired by point-based global illumination and texture-space split rendering, we propose point-based split ambient occlusion (PSAO), a novel split-rendering system that streams points sparsely from server to client. PSAO first evenly distributes points across the scene, and then subsequently only transmits points that changed more than a given threshold, using an efficient hash grid to blend neighboring points for the final compositing pass on the client. PSAO outperforms recent texture-space shading approaches in terms of quality and required network bit rate, while demonstrating performance similar to commonly used lower-quality screen-space approaches. Our point-based split rendering representation lends itself to highly compressible signals such as AO and is scalable towards quality or bandwidth requirements by adjusting the number of points in the scene.
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    SnakeBinning: Efficient Temporally Coherent Triangle Packing for Shading Streaming
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Hladky, Jozef; Seidel, Hans-Peter; Steinberger, Markus; Mitra, Niloy and Viola, Ivan
    Streaming rendering, e.g., rendering in the cloud and streaming via a mobile connection, suffers from increased latency and unreliable connections. High quality framerate upsampling can hide these issues, especially when capturing shading into an atlas and transmitting it alongside geometric information. The captured shading information must consider triangle footprints and temporal stability to ensure efficient video encoding. Previous approaches only consider either temporal stability or sample distributions, but none focuses on both. With SnakeBinning, we present an efficient triangle packing approach that adjusts sample distributions and caters for temporal coherence. Using a multi-dimensional binning approach, we enforce tight packing among triangles while creating optimal sample distributions. Our binning is built on top of hardware supported real-time rendering where bins are mapped to individual pixels in a virtual framebuffer. Fragment shader interlock and atomic operations enforce global ordering of triangles within each bin, and thus temporal coherence according to the primitive order is achieved. Resampling the bin distribution guarantees high occupancy among all bins and a dense atlas packing. Shading samples are directly captured into the atlas using a rasterization pass, adjusting samples for perspective effects and creating a tight packing. Comparison to previous atlas packing approaches shows that our approach is faster than previous work and achieves the best sample distributions while maintaining temporal coherence. In this way, SnakeBinning achieves the highest rendering quality under equal atlas memory requirements. At the same time, its temporal coherence ensures that we require equal or less bandwidth than previous state-of-the-art. As SnakeBinning outperforms previous approach in all relevant aspects, it is the preferred choice for texture-based streaming rendering.
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    Surface Light Cones: Sharing Direct Illumination for Efficient Multi-viewer Rendering
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Stadlbauer, Pascal; Weinrauch, Alexander; Tatzgern, Wolfgang; Steinberger, Markus; Bikker, Jacco; Gribble, Christiaan
    Even though stochastic methods and hardware supported ray tracing are increasingly used for computing direct illumination, the efficient real-time rendering of dynamic area light sources still forms a challenge. In this paper, we propose a method for representing and caching direct illumination information using a compact multi-cone representation that is stored on the surface of objects. While shading due to direct illumination is typically heavily view-dependent, the incoming radiance for surface points is view-independent. Relying on cones, to represent the projection of the dominant visible light sources, allows to reuse the incoming radiance information across frames and even among multiple cameras or viewers within the same scene. Progressively refining and updating the cone structures not only allows to adapt to dynamic scenes, but also leads to reduced noise levels in the output images compared to sampling based methods. Relying on surface light cones allows to render single viewer setups 2-3x faster than random sampling, and 1.5-2x faster than reservoir-based sampling with the same quality. The main selling point for surface light cones is multi-camera rendering, For stereo rendering, our approach essentially halves the time required for determining direct light visibility. For rendering in the cloud, where multiple viewers are positioned close to another, such as in virtual meetings, gathering locations in games, or online events such as virtual concerts, our approach can reduce overall rendering times by a factor of 20x for as few as 16 viewers in a scene compared to traditional light sampling. Finally, under heavily constraint ray budgets where noise levels typically overshadow bias, surface light cones can dramatically reduce noise.