High-Performance Graphics 2025 - Symposium Papers

Permanent URI for this collection

https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/3607202

Browse

Browsing High-Performance Graphics 2025 - Symposium Papers by Subject "Computing methodologies → Rendering"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Fast Planetary Shadows using Fourier-Compressed Horizon Maps
    (The Eurographics Association, 2025) Fritsch, Jonathan; Schneegans, Simon; Friederichs, Fabian; Flatken, Markus; Eisemann, Martin; Gerndt, Andreas; Knoll, Aaron; Peters, Christoph
    Shadows on large-scale terrains are important for many applications, including video games and scientific visualization. Yet real-time rendering of realistic soft shadows at planetary scale is a challenging task. Notably, many shadowing algorithms require keeping significant amounts of extra terrain geometry in memory to account for out-of-frustum occluders. We present Fourier-Compressed Horizon Mapping, an enhancement of the horizon mapping algorithm which is able to circumvent this requirement and render shadows in a single render pass. For a given digital elevation model, we create a compact representation of each pixel's horizon profile and use it to render soft shadows at runtime. This representation is based on a truncated Fourier series stored in a multi-resolution texture pyramid and can be encoded in a single four-channel 32 bit floating point texture. This makes this approach especially suitable for applications using a level-of-detail system for terrain rendering. By using a compact representation in frequency space, compressed horizon mapping consistently creates more accurate shadows compared to traditional horizon maps of the same memory footprint, while still running well at real-time frame rates.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    No More Shading Languages: Compiling C++ to Vulkan Shaders
    (The Eurographics Association, 2025) Devillers, Hugo; Kurtenacker, Matthias; Membarth, Richard; Lemme, Stefan; Kenzel, Michael; Yazici, Ömercan; Slusallek, Philipp; Knoll, Aaron; Peters, Christoph
    Graphics APIs have traditionally relied on shading languages, however, these languages have a number of fundamental defects and limitations. By contrast, GPU compute platforms offer powerful, feature-rich languages suitable for heterogeneous compute. We propose reframing shading languages as embedded domain-specific languages, layered on top of a more general language like C++, doing away with traditional limitations on pointers, functions, and recursion, to the benefit of programmability. This represents a significant compilation challenge because the limitations of shaders are reflected in their lower-level representations. We present the Vcc compiler, which allows conventional C and C++ code to run as Vulkan shaders. Our compiler is complemented by a simple shading library and exposes GPU particulars as intrinsics and annotations. We evaluate the performance of our compiler using a selection of benchmarks, including a real-time path tracer, achieving competitive performance compared to their native CUDA counterparts.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Real-Time GPU Tree Generation
    (The Eurographics Association, 2025) Kuth, Bastian; Oberberger, Max; Faber, Carsten; Pfeifer, Pirmin; Tabaei, Seyedmasih; Baumeister, Dominik; Meyer, Quirin; Knoll, Aaron; Peters, Christoph
    Trees for real-time media are typically created using procedural algorithms and then baked to a polygon format, requiring large amounts of memory. We propose a novel procedural system and model for generating and rendering realistic trees and similar vegetation specifically tailored to run in real-time on GPUs. By using GPU work graphs with mesh nodes, we render gigabytes-worth of tree geometry from kilobytes of generation code every frame exclusively on the GPU. Contrary to prior work, our method combines instant in-engine artist authoring, continuous frame-specific level of detail and tessellation, highly detailed animation, and seasonal details like blossoms, fruits, and snow. Generating the unique tree geometries of our teaser test scene and rendering them to the G-buffer takes 3.13 ms on an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX.