Enhancing and Optimizing the Render Cache

Abstract

Interactive rendering often requires the use of simplified shading algorithms with reduced illumination fidelity. Higher quality rendering algorithms are usually too slow for interactive use. The render cache is a technique to bridge this performance gap and allow ray-based renderers to be used in interactive contexts by providing automatic sample interpolation, frame-to-frame sample reuse, and prioritized sampling. In this paper we present several extensions to the original render cache including predictive sampling, reorganized computation for better memory coherence, an additional interpolation filter to handle sparser data, and SIMD acceleration. These optimizations allow the render cache to scale to larger resolutions, reduce its visual artifacts, and provide better handling of low sample rates. We also provide a downloadable binary to allow researchers to evaluate and use the render cache.