Direct coherent ray generation for path tracing
摘要
Path-tracing methods typically generate incoherent rays due to randomized direction sampling, leading to inefficiency on modern processors that rely on coherence. While previous approaches aimed to enhance coherence by reordering rays based on origins and directions, they often suffer from significant overhead of ray encoding and sorting and show limited effectiveness in large, complex scenes. To further accelerate performance, we propose a technique to generate coherent rays directly by reusing secondary ray directions within spatially grouped pixels, thereby eliminating the need for reordering. Additionally, to control sampling correlation and preserve visual quality, we introduce an interleaved grouping strategy that distributes shared directions while maintaining local coherence. Compared to traditional reordering-based methods, our approach achieves significant speedup while maintaining high rendering quality with minimal artifacts, as demonstrated across a variety of test scenes.