GPU Unchained ASCII Notes

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                                |imothy Lottes



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         VISUALIZING ALIASING IN MOTION - STILL VS SCROLLING FONTS [a]
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"Evaluation criteria for correct sharpness
                                should be different for stills and video"

SPATIAL PRECISION VS SHARPNESS
------------------------------
 - In motion, sharpess must be reduced to have good spatial precision

LIVE EXAMPLE OF FONT RENDERING
------------------------------
 - 1/4 x 1/4 resolution rendering 
 - Render via stylized even field aperture grille (arcade Trinitron)
 - Font designed on pixel grid 
 - Font rendered via function of min 1D distance to capsules (for lines)


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                         FILTERING DIGITAL ORIGAMI [b]
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"Filtering is critical 
              to convince the skeptical mind that a scene is believable"

LIVE EXAMPLE OF SIMPLE SDF SCENE
--------------------------------
 - 1/2 x 1/2 resolution tracing
 - Full resolution reconstruction
 - Lots of high frequency sub-pixel sized content

PROGRESSION TO SIMPLE SAMPLE JITTERED TEMPORAL FILTERING
--------------------------------------------------------
 - Simple gaussian resolve kernel (not enough samples/pix for negative lobes)
 - Temporal feedback also weights samples by rcp of reprojected luma difference


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                   LIMITS OF PER-PIXEL SEARCH AND SDF LOD [c]
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"Highly variable frame timing is a poison for high refresh rates"

RAY HIT?
--------
 - Standard termination,
     if(abs(distanceToSurface) <= distanceAlongRay * coneRadius) hit
 - LOD termination,
     ... <= distanceAlongRay * (coneRadius + steps * lodFactor)) hit
 - Expands surfaces as ray march gets progressively more expensive

CHOOSING A GOOD FILTER KERNEL
-----------------------------
 - Biased: 
     1/(1 + abs(a-b) * const)
 - Still not great: 
     1/(1 + (abs(a-b) / max(minimum,min(a,b))) * const)
 - Better:
     square(1 - abs(a-b) / max(a,b,minimum))


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            1/4 AREA TRACE+FEEDBACK + FULL AREA RECONSTRUCTION [d]
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"Maintaining higher spatial precision
               without increasing shading rate for higher quality visual"

VISUAL EXAMPLE
--------------   
 - Still tracing at sample-jittered half resolution (1/4 area).
 - Still sampling reprojection at half resolution.
 - But sampling reprojection from full resolution source.
 - And running reconstruction at full resolution.


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                  HIERARCHICAL TRAVERSAL IN SINGLE KERNEL [e]
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"Reorder work to keep ALUs fully loaded,
                      ok to leverage poor data access patterns if ALU bound"

THREAD TO WORK MAPPING
----------------------
 - Not pixel to thread -> too much ALU under utilization after rays hit surf
 - Rather fixed distance estimator iterations per thread

SHADER
------
 - Fetch ray
 - For fixed traversal iterations
    - Distance estimation
    - Walk forward
    - If ray hit (aka "close enough")
       - Store result
       - Start on another ray

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                                  BREAD CRUMBS [e]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"When working in parallel, don't wait, if data isn't ready, just compute it"

TRAVERSAL ORDERING
------------------
 - Order rays by parent cones first in space filling curve,

     0 -> 12 -> 4589 -> and so on
          34    67ab
                cdgh
                efij

ACCELERATION
------------
 - Cones end by writing their stop depth into memory.
 - Child cones will check for completed parent result,
   otherwise will start from scratch.

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                                 IN THE NOISE [e]  
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Degrade to pleasing noise when out of time"

TRADE RELATIVELY FIXED TIME FOR NOISE
-------------------------------------
 - Fixed maximum DE iterations -> not always going to traverse full scene
 - Ok fine, lets not require tracing all rays

RAY ORDERING FOR FULL RESOLUTION
--------------------------------
 - Fill ordering,

    0 7 E 5   0 . . .   0 7 . 5   0 7 . 5
    C 3 A 1   . 3 . 1   . 3 . 1   . 3 A 1
    8 F 6 D   . . . .   . . 6 .   8 . 6 .
    4 B 2 9   . . 2 .   4 . 2 .   4 B 2 9

 - Pattern defined by math (fast but perhaps not ideal)
 - Each frame gets different fill order (holes not always in same place)


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                FILTERED RECONSTRUCTION FROM DIFFERENT DOMAIN [f]
================================================================================

360 DEG FISHEYE EXAMPLE
-----------------------
 - Rendering into an octahedron map
 - Each sample writes out {x,y} projected screen position
 - Distortion finds the nearest texel in the octahedron map
 - Then samples a neighborhood around the texel
 - Then uses the difference in pixel center and sample {x,y} to filter
 - Reprojection samples from the warped reconstructed frame
 - Ideally adjust the filter kernel based on domain distortion
    - Showing simple adjustment of kernel size here (anisotropic is better)