20161114 - Believing in an Image
Distraction Free Rendering
The stills below are from the filtering talk I gave a while back. Showing a journey through some folded fractal space. They are captures from a real-time tracer running at over 120 Hz at 1080p on a 2.8 Tflop/s laptop GPU.
The images have better than 1080p resolution phase response, meaning you can localize the position of an edge to a sub-pixel position. However the images have lower than 1080p frequency response, meaning the images look substantially sharper when viewed at half resolution. This is a direct result of the following process,
- Each frame traces 960x540 rays in a temporally changing low-discrepancy pattern.
- The rays also sample their prior color as reprojected from the prior 1920x1080 frame.
- Finaly the {new,old} output at low-descrepency 960x540, is reconstructed at regular grid 1920x1080.
As you move through the space in real-time, the output feels like a window into another world. There is nothing in the visual output which breaks immersion. It makes no difference that in terms of sharpness this could only qualify as a 480x270 image if the evaluation metric was to match the visual sharpness of bitmap text.
The critical element is a total lack of any kind of temporal aliasing, mixed with sub-pixel precision for localizing all edge gradients.
