A Survey on Temporal Coherence Methods in Real-Time Rendering

Scherzer, Daniel; Yang, Lei; Mattausch, Oliver; Nehab, Diego; Sander, Pedro V.; Wimmer, Michael; Eisemann, Elmar

A Survey on Temporal Coherence Methods in Real-Time Rendering

Files

101-126.pdf (4.4 MB)

Date

2011

Authors

Scherzer, Daniel
Yang, Lei
Mattausch, Oliver
Nehab, Diego
Sander, Pedro V.
Wimmer, Michael
Eisemann, Elmar

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

Nowadays, there is a strong trend towards rendering to higher-resolution displays and at high frame rates. This development aims at delivering more detail and better accuracy, but it also comes at a significant cost. Although graphics cards continue to evolve with an ever-increasing amount of computational power, the processing gain is counteracted to a high degree by increasingly complex and sophisticated pixel computations. For real-time applications, the direct consequence is that image resolution and temporal resolution are often the first candidates to bow to the performance constraints (e.g., although full HD is possible, PS3 and XBox often render at lower resolutions). In order to achieve high-quality rendering at a lower cost, one can exploit temporal coherence (TC). The underlying observation is that a higher resolution and frame rate do not necessarily imply a much higher workload, but a larger amount of redundancy and a higher potential for amortizing rendering over several frames. In this state-of-the-art report, we investigate methods that make use of this principle and provide practical and theoretical advice on how to exploit temporal coherence for performance optimization. These methods not only allow incorporating more computationally intensive shading effects into many existing applications, but also offer exciting opportunities for extending high-end graphics applications to lower-spec consumer-level hardware. To this end, we first introduce the notion and main concepts of TC, including an overview of historical methods. We then describe a key data structure, the so-called reprojection cache, with several supporting algorithms that facilitate reusing shading information from previous frames, and finally illustrated its usefulness in various applications.

        @inproceedings{10.2312:EG2011/stars/101-126
,
booktitle = {Eurographics 2011 - State of the Art Reports
},
editor = {N. John and B. Wyvill
},
title = {{A Survey on Temporal Coherence Methods in Real-Time Rendering
}},
author = {Scherzer, Daniel and 
Yang, Lei and 
Mattausch, Oliver and 
Nehab, Diego and 
Sander, Pedro V. and 
Wimmer, Michael and 
Eisemann, Elmar
},
year = {2011
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1017-4656
},
ISBN = {},
DOI = {10.2312/EG2011/stars/101-126
}
}