Generalized Decoupled and Object Space Shading System

Abstract

We present a generalized decoupled and object space shading system. This system includes a new layer material system, a dynamic hierarchical sparse shade space allocation system, a GPU shade work dispatcher, and a multi-frame shade work distribution system. Together, these new systems create a generalized solution to decoupled shading, solving both the visibility problem, where shading samples which are not visible are shaded; the overshading and under shading problem, where parts of the scene are shaded at higher or lower number of samples than needed; and the shade allocation problem, where shade samples must be efficiently stored in GPU memory. The generalized decoupled shading system introduced shades and stores only the samples which are actually needed for the rendering a frame, with minimal overshading and no undershading. It does so with minimal overhead, and overall performance is competitive with other rendering techniques on a modern GPU.