Anisotropic Shade Space Density for Decoupled Shading

Resolve Bottlenecks,
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions

Solution Overview

Problem

Decoupled rendering techniques face difficulties in performing anisotropic filtering due to the lack of correlation between shade space pixel spacing and material texture texel spacing, leading to increased computational intensity and visual artifacts.

Innovation Solution

The technique involves determining gradients for material texture to shade space texture and shade space to screen space to enable anisotropic filtering in the shade space shading operation, reducing the need for complex filtering in the reconstruction operation by 'baking' anisotropy into the shade space texture.

Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles

VSEngineering Contradiction Analysis

1Productivity

If decoupled rendering techniques are used without anisotropic filtering in shade space, then rendering speed is improved, but visual quality deteriorates due to filtering artifacts

Engineering Contradiction:

Improverendering speedVSAvoidvisual quality

Core Design Contradiction:

ProductivityVSManufacturing precision

Solution Approach 1:

The patent applies anisotropic filtering during the shade space shading operation (visibility pass) in advance, before the reconstruction operation. By pre-calculating and baking anisotropic filter samples into the shade space texture, the system eliminates the need for complex filtering during reconstruction, thus maintaining high rendering speeds while achieving visual quality comparable to or better than traditional deferred shading with anisotropic filtering.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #10Preliminary action

2Manufacturing precision

If complex anisotropic filtering is performed in the reconstruction operation, then visual quality is improved, but computational intensity increases

Engineering Contradiction:

Improvevisual qualityVSAvoidcomputational intensity

Core Design Contradiction:

Manufacturing precisionVSPower

Solution Approach 1:

The patent extracts the computationally intensive anisotropic filtering operation from the reconstruction phase and moves it to the shade space shading operation. By performing the filtering in advance during visibility pass and baking the results into shade space texture, the system removes the heavy computational burden from the reconstruction operation, reducing GPU workload and power consumption while maintaining visual quality.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #2Taking out (Extraction)

3Device complexity

If isotropic filtering is used in decoupled shading, then device complexity is reduced, but visual artifacts increase

Engineering Contradiction:

Improvefiltering complexityVSAvoidvisual artifacts

Core Design Contradiction:

Device complexityVSObject-generated harmful factors

Solution Approach 1:

The patent changes the filtering parameter from isotropic to anisotropic during the shade space shading operation. By applying anisotropic filtering that accounts for the directional sampling patterns in shade space, the system eliminates the visual artifacts (such as blurring and aliasing) that would result from using simpler isotropic filtering, while the filtered results are baked into the texture to maintain acceptable complexity in the reconstruction phase.

Inventive Principle:

Principle #35Parameter changes

Data Source

PatentUS20250005849A1Anisotropic shade space sample density for decoupled shading

Publication Date: 2025.01.02 ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES INC

AI summary

A technique for rendering is provided. The technique includes determining a first correspondence between a screen space and a shade space in a visibility pass; selecting a size for a shade space tile based on the correspondence between the screen space and the shade space; and shading the shade space tile based on the material texture correspondence.