Nvidia Corporation

Other

University of Utah Research Foundation

Peter Schuyler Shirley

Robert Anthony Alfieri

Morgan McGuire

Christopher Ryan Wyman

David Patrick Luebke

Michael Mara

Peter-Pike Sloan

Brent Leonard Oster

Samuli Matias Laine

Timo Oskari Aila

Cyril Crassin

William P Newhall, Jr

Jaakko Tapani Lehtinen

Jonathan Cohen

Ward Lopes

Solomon Boulos

Jessica E Johnson

Tero Tapani Karras

Ingo Wald

David Kirk McAllister

Aaron Eliot Lefohn

Matthew Milton Pharr

Eric Enderton

Thomas Müller

Cyril Jean-Francois Crassin

Jui-Hsien Wang

Michael Robert Phillips

Jared Moroni Johnson

Austin Huff Robison

David Augustus Hart

Rachel Anastasia Brown

Devices, systems, and techniques to incorporate lighting effects into computer-generated graphics. In at least one embodiment, a virtual scene comprising a plurality of lights is rendered by randomly sampling a set of lights from among the plurality of lights prior to rendering a frame of graphics. A subset of the set of lights is selected and used to render pixels within one or more portions of the frame.

Using importance resampling to reduce the memory incoherence of light sampling

One embodiment of a computer-implemented method for processing ray tracing operations in parallel includes receiving a plurality of rays and a corresponding set of importance sampling instructions for each ray included in the plurality of rays for processing, wherein each ray represents a path from a light source to at least one point within a three-dimensional (3D) environment, and each corresponding set of importance sampling instruction is based at least in part on one or more material properties associated with at least one surface of at least one object included in the 3D environment; assigning each ray included in the plurality of rays to a different processing core included in a plurality of processing cores; and for each ray included in the plurality of rays, causing the processing core assigned to the ray to execute the corresponding set of importance sampling instructions on the ray to generate a direction for a secondary ray that is produced when the ray intersects a surface of an object within the 3D environment.

Accelerated processing via a physically based rendering engine

The present invention facilitates efficient and effective image processing. A network can comprise: a first system configured to perform a first portion of lighting calculations for an image and combing results of the first portion of lighting calculations for the image with results of a second portion of lighting calculations; and a second system configured to perform the second portion of lighting calculations and forward the results of the second portion of the lighting calculations to the first system. The first and second portion of lighting calculations can be associated with indirect lighting calculations and direct lighting calculations respectively. The first system can be a client in a local location and the second system can be a server in a remote location (e.g., a cloud computing environment). The first system and second system can be in a cloud and a video is transmitted to a local system.

Asynchronous lighting for image illumination

One embodiment of a computer-implemented method for processing ray tracing operations in parallel includes receiving a plurality of rays and a corresponding set of material shading instructions for each ray included in the plurality of rays for processing, wherein each ray represents a path from a light source to at least one point within a three-dimensional (3D) environment, and each corresponding set of material shading instructions is based at least in part on one or more material properties associated with at least one surface of at least one object included in the 3D environment; assigning each ray included in the plurality of rays to a different processing core included in a plurality of processing cores; and for each ray included in the plurality of rays, causing the processing core assigned to the ray to execute the corresponding set of material shading instructions on the ray to generate a color.

One embodiment of a computer-implemented method for decompressing a compressed texture block includes identifying a first texel included in a plurality of texels, wherein the plurality of texels forms at least a portion of a compressed texture block; determining a first location within the compressed texel block that corresponds to the first texel; and extracting the first texel from the first location without decompressing any of the other texels included in the plurality of texels.

One embodiment of a computer-implemented method for compiling a material graph into a set of instructions for execution within an execution unit includes receiving a first material graph having a plurality of nodes, wherein each node included in the plurality of nodes represents a different surface property of a material; parsing the material graph to generate an expression tree that includes one or more expressions for each node included in the plurality of nodes; and generating a set of byte code instructions corresponding to the material graph based on the expression tree, wherein the byte code instructions are executable by a plurality of processing cores included within the execution unit.

One embodiment of a computer-implemented method for processing data within a fixed-function pipeline included in an execution unit includes receiving a first input from a first processing unit, wherein the first input corresponds to a first fixed-function; executing the first fixed-function on the first input to generate a first output, wherein the first fixed-function is executed on the first input prior to executing the first fixed-function on one or more inputs received from a plurality of processing cores that are processing a plurality of rays, and wherein each ray represents a path from a light source to at least one point within a three-dimensional (3D) environment; and transmitting the first output to the first processing unit for further processing.

The computational scaling challenges of holographic displays are mitigated by techniques for generating holograms that introduce foveation into a wave front recording planes approach to hologram generation. Spatial hashing is applied to organize the points or polygons of a display object into keys and values.

Foveation and spatial hashing in layer-based computer-generated holograms

Disclosed are systems and methods for influencing the mood of a person using a synthetic window. The system includes storing one or more excitement scenes and one or more calming scenes, where the excitement scenes when displayed on the display produce an excitatory environment and the calming scenes when displayed on the display produce a calming environment. The system also includes receiving input as to a type of mood of the person, selecting an excitement scene or a calming scene in response to the mood type received, and displaying the selected scene on the display.

Computer implemented display system responsive to a detected mood of a person

A global illumination data structure (e.g., a data structure created to store global illumination information for geometry within a scene to be rendered) is computed for the scene. Additionally, reservoir-based spatiotemporal importance resampling (RESTIR) is used to perform illumination gathering, utilizing the global illumination data structure. The illumination gathering includes identifying light values for points within the scene, where one or more points are selected within the scene based on the light values in order to perform ray tracing during the rendering of the scene.

Reservoir-based spatiotemporal importance resampling utilizing a global illumination data structure

Photon-based image illumination rendering

Sampling a function is used for many applications, such as rendering images. The challenge is how to select the best samples to minimize computations and produce accurate results. An alternative is to use a larger number of samples that may not be carefully selected in an attempt to increase accuracy. For a function that is an integral, such as functions used to render images, a sample distribution may be computed by inverting the integral. Unfortunately, for many integrals, it is neither easy nor practical to compute the inverted integral. Instead, warp functions may be combined to provide a sample distribution that accurately approximates the factors of the product being integrated. Each warp function approximates an inverted term of the product while accounting for the effects of warp functions approximating other factors in the product. The selected warp functions are customized or 'fitted' to implement importance sampling for the approximated product.

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Salt Lake City, UT, United States of America

Peter Schuyler Shirley