Real-Time Global Illumination on GPUs

Mangesh Nijasure and Sumanta N. Pattanaik
University of Central Florida

This paper appears in issue Volume 10, Number 2.
An electronic version of this article is available.

Abstract

We have developed a system for computing a plausible global illumination solution for dynamic environments in real time on programmable graphics processors (GPUs). The entire algorithm runs on DirectX 9.0 compatible graphics hardware using vertex and fragment shaders, and computes a global illumination solution for reasonably complex scenes with moving objects and moving lights at frame rates of 10-40 fps. We present the salient steps of the algorithm that made this real-time global illumination evaluation possible.

Author Information

Mangesh Nijasure, University of Central Florida, Department of Computer Science, Orlando, FL 32816-2362 nijasure@cs.ucf.edu

Sumanta N. Pattanaik, University of Central Florida, Department of Computer Science, Orlando, FL 32816-2362 sumant@cs.ucf.edu

Vineet Goel, ATI Research, 3510 Quadrangle Blvd, Orlando, FL 32817 vgoel@ati.com

Executable Demo

The following downladable archives include executables and the test scene; the executables have been succesfully tested on ATI’s Radeon 9700 and 9800 series:

OGL_GI_EXE.zip (3.0M) OpenGL version, uses vendor-specific extensions and hence will only run on ATI cards.
D3D_GI_EXE.zip (3.0M) DirectX version, will run on any programmable GPU with full with full DirectX 9.0 support including floating-point offscreen render targets.

Video

The following video demonstrates the algorithm. The video requires the DivX 5.2.1 codec, available for download from divx.com, or can be played using VLC.

Real_Time_GI_GPU.avi (4.3M)

BibTeX Entry

@article{NijasureEtAl05,
  author = "Mangesh Nijasure and Sumanta N. Pattanaik and Vineet Goel",
  title = "Real-Time Global Illumination on GPUs",
  journal = "journal of graphics, gpu, and game tools",
  volume = "10",
  number = "2",
  pages = "55-71",
  year = "2005",
}