Project Overview

I've started this blog to keep track of the progress of my 4th year honours project.  During the first semester I researched and proposed a project that uses GPGPU programming to improve the efficiency of common multi-pass render techniques.  In January, my project was approved and now I am starting fun part of the project: the execution phase.

Below is the abstract from my proposal that gives a good overview of what I am attempting to accomplish.  In the following weeks, I will update my progress coding the project, both in pre-production of tools to help collect metrics and the production phase that will implement some of these render techniques. 

ABSTRACT:

Large quality differences still exist between real-time rendering in games and offline CGI used in film. However, expectations for high quality images in games continue to rise as CG is increasingly used in everyday media. Despite improvements to GPU hardware, modern rendering approaches continue to suffer from scaling issues and performance cliffs: a non-trivial obstacle to developers’ attempts to increase fidelity in geometric, illumination, and post-process techniques.

This project proposes optimisations to modern game rendering pipelines that use programmable stages on the GPU, principally GPGPU solutions implemented with DirectCompute. The proposed research will implement data-parallel designs in a high fidelity case study. Profiling of this artifact will be used to qualify overheads, and to evaluate potential design patterns that may be applied to a wider range of multi-pass render techniques. The case study will consist of reorganising and revising a deferred shading, single bounce indirect illumination algorithm, as this lighting solution decouples geometric and lighting complexities and can be parallelised effectively. Additionally, this approach can extend not only to other illumination algorithms but to other, traditionally multi-pass, geometric and post-process techniques.