Real Time Volumetric Ray Marching with Ordered Dithering : Reducing required samples for ray marched volumetric lighting on the GPU
Abstract: Volumetric Lighting is a collective term for visual phenomena that occur due to how light interacts inside so-called participating media, and it accounts for many recognizable effects such as fog or light shafts. Because it isvery computationally expensive, it has been an importantproblem within computer graphics to calculate volumetriclighting, both accurately and efficiently. Ray Marching is a technique that has been used extensively in non real-time applications to compute volumetriclighting and has recently been adapted for real time applications by use of the GPU. In this thesis we implement andevaluatevolumetric ray marching with ordered dithering. The results show how ordered dithering yields significant performance improvements, retaining high quality while lowering the number of samples. We conclude that with ordered dithering, volumetric ray marching is a suitable approach for real time volumetric ray marching on the GPU and we discuss both important additional optimizationsand how ordered dithering will likely remain important in future ray marching implementations.
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