Mesh Colors provide an effective alternative to standard texture mapping. They significantly simplify the asset production pipeline by removing the need for defining a mapping and eliminate rendering artifacts due to seams. This article addresses the problem that using Mesh Colors for real-time rendering has not been practical, due to the absence of hardware support. We show that it is possible to provide full hardware texture filtering support for Mesh Colors with minimal changes to existing GPUs by introducing a hardware-friendly representation for Mesh Colors that we call Patch Textures, which can have quadrilateral or triangular topology. We discuss the hardware modifications needed for storing and filtering Patch Textures, including anisotropic filtering. This article extends our previous work by discussing and comparing patch edge-handling approaches, including an option for sampling the textures of neighboring patches using an adjacency map. We also provide extensive discussions regarding data duplication, a partial implementation present in existing hardware, and the difficulties with providing a similar hardware support for Ptex.

We introduce the dual-split tree, a new tree-based acceleration structure for ray tracing. Each internal node of a dual-split tree uses two axis-aligned planes to either split the parent node into two child nodes or to mark the empty regions of the node. This allows child bounding boxes to overlap when desired. Thus, our dual-split tree is capable of representing space partitioning identical to any given bounding volume hierarchy. Our dual-split tree provides a significant reduction in the required acceleration structure storage by eliminating the redundant bounding planes that are commonplace in bounding volume hierarchies, providing better performance and storage savings than similar previous methods. As a result, we achieve improved rendering performance with dual-split trees, as compared to bounding volume hierarchies with a comparable level of optimization using identical or similar space partitioning.

SimTRaX is a simulation infrastructure for simultaneous exploration of highly parallel accelerator architectures and how applications map to them. The infrastructure targets both cycle-accurate and functional simulation of architectures with thousands of simple cores that may share expensive computation and memory resources. A modified LLVM backend used to compile C++ programs for the simulated architecture allows the user to create custom instructions that access proposed special-purpose hardware and to debug and profile the applications being executed. The simulator models a full memory hierarchy including registers, local scratchpad RAM, shared caches, external memory channels, and DRAM main memory, leveraging the USIMM DRAM simulator to provide accurate dynamic latencies and power usage. SimTRaX provides a powerful and flexible infrastructure for exploring a class of extremely parallel architectures for parallel applications that are not easily simulated using existing simulators.

We introduce a new motion blur computation method for ray tracing that provides an analytical approximation of motion blurred visibility per ray. Rather than relying on timestamped rays and Monte Carlo sampling to resolve the motion blur, we associate a time interval with rays and directly evaluate when and where each ray intersects with animated object faces. Based on our simplifications, the volume swept by each animated face is represented using a triangulation of the surface of this volume. Thus, we can resolve motion blur through ray intersections with stationary triangles, and we can use any standard ray tracing acceleration structure without modifications to account for the time dimension. Rays are intersected with these triangles to analytically determine the time interval and positions of the intersections with the moving objects. Furthermore, we explain an adaptive strategy to efficiently shade the intersection intervals. As a result, we can produce noise-free motion blur for both primary and secondary rays. We also provide a general framework for emulating various camera shutter mechanisms and an artistic modification that amplifies the visibility of moving objects for emphasizing the motion in videos or static images.

The primary advantage of deferred shading is eliminating wasted shading operations for fragments that are occluded by others during rendering. Deferred shading starts by rendering the entire scene into a series of temporary buffers (a geometry buffer or G-buffer). Then, it performs the shading operations using the contents of these buffers. Hence, deferred shading executes the (potentially expensive) fragment shader exactly once for a given pixel sample, avoiding additional fragment shading invocations due to overdrawing. Although deferred shading requires an extra pass and significant memory overhead to store the G-buffer, it can still be beneficial to performance when fragment shading is sufficiently expensive.