GDC is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

View, browse and sort the ever-growing list of sessions by day, pass type, topic, and format. With this Session Viewer, you can view GDC 2023 session details and speakers, and share your favorites via social media. You will be able to build your schedule and access it during the show via export or Mobile App, once live. Sessions do fill up and seating is first come, first serve, so arrive early to sessions that you would like to attend.

Advanced Graphics Summit: Two-Level Radiance Caching for Fast and Scalable Real-Time Dynamic Global Illumination in Games

Guillaume Boisse  (Senior Graphics Programmer, AMD)

Location: Room 301, South Hall

Date: Monday, March 20

Time: 2:40 pm - 3:40 pm

Pass Type: All Access Pass, Summits Pass

Topic: Programming

Format: Lecture

Vault Recording: Video

Audience Level: Advanced

Real-time global illumination is key to enabling dynamic and believable game worlds. GPU-accelerated ray tracing makes this possible; however, framerate and resolution requirements limit the number of traceable rays per pixel, imposing practical limits on current hardware generations. Existing solutions, such as probe-based techniques, approximate the irradiance signal using fewer rays per frame but suffer from reduced details and slow response times to lighting changes. On the other hand, reservoir-based resampling techniques capture higher detail but typically suffer from poorer performance and increased noise.

In this presentation, Guillaume Boisse, Senior Graphics Programmer at AMD, will walk through the practical implementation of a solution aimed at making the most of every sample by caching the estimated radiance into a cache hierarchy used for both sampling and filtering. He will show how this approach allows for highly performant, high-quality, dynamic, and leak-free global illumination without requiring any content pre-processing, thus enabling easy integration into existing real-time rendering pipelines.