High-fidelity graphics for dynamically generated environments using distributed computing

Abstract

In many serious games and applications, increasing visual fidelity enhances immersion. While physically-based renderers can produce highly realistic imagery by correctly simulating light propagation, these are impractical in the context of interactive applications due to lengthy computations. For real-time applications, several rasterisation-based techniques have been developed to augment the visual realism in a scene, such as the inclusion of shadows and ambient occlusion. These techniques however, come at the cost of additional compute resources from GPUs. This paper describes a novel technique which takes advantage of the distributed computational resources available at peers participating in a serious game to precompute the light distribution in the virtual environment. This additional information is then included within the vertex geometry of the scene and used at no extra costs whilst rendering. Experimental evaluation shows that the rendered virtual environments are much more realistic and more closely match reference imagery generated by physically-based renderers.