Abstract
Abstract
Recently, with the advent of real-time ray tracing on consumer-grade graphical processing units (GPUs), hybrid methods that leverage the rasterization pipeline and ray tracing became prevalent. The decades of research progress put in the rasterization pipeline made it possible to render some must-have phenomena to achieve realistic images such as shadows, reflections, refractions in real-time, albeit under certain assumptions, as well as with limitations and artifacts. We propose three hybrid rendering pipelines that leverages ray tracing to address the artifacts related to screen-space reflections (SSR). Similar to a G-buffer, we first construct a reflection event buffer using either raytracing or SSR to store the ground-truth information that includes world positions and the object ID where the reflection hit occurs. Using this buffer, we identify the pixels in which artifacts occur during SSR pass and correct these pixels using ray tracing. The method keeps the shading complexity in ray tracing simple and ray payload small, while maintaining visual fidelity by mitigating the common artifacts in SSR. We have analyzed our pipelines against a combined naive rasterization and ray tracing pipeline and determine an efficient downsampling strategy for the reflection event buffers. Our hybrid pipelines bridge the gap between existing SSR implementations and full real-time ray-traced reflections. The downsampled pipeline offers a straightforward and efficient path for adapting current rendering pipelines to incorporate the benefits of ray tracing, while maintaining performance suitable for real-time applications.