Applications of temporal coherence in real-time rendering

Abstract

Real-time rendering imposes the challenging task of creating a new rendering of an input scene at least 60 times a second. Although computer graphics hardware has made staggering advances in terms of speed and freedom of programmability, there still exist a number of algorithms that are too expensive to be calculated in this time budget, like exact shadows or an exact global illumination solution. One way to circumvent this hard time limit is to capitalize on temporal coherence to formulate algorithms incremental in time. The main thesis of this work is that temporal coherence is a characteristic of real-time graphics that can be used to redesign well-known rendering methods to become faster, while exhibiting better visual fidelity. To this end we present our adaptations of algorithms from the fields of exact hard shadows, physically correct soft shadows and fast discrete LOD blending, in which we have successfully incorporated temporal coherence. Additionally, we provide a detailed context of previous work not only in the field of temporal coherence, but also in the respective fields of the presented algorithms.