What is it about?
Opacity Micromaps is a relatively new concept that has been added to the modern graphics toolkit: It is primarily used to improve performance for ray-tracing, but has so far been relatively poorly understood. This work clarifies how this concept is best applied, and further attempts to improve upon it by introducing a compression algorithm to reduce the size of these objects.
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Why is it important?
Opacity Micromaps is a useful concept for eking out as much performance as possible from the hardware accelerated ray-tracing pipeline when AnyHit shaders are being used. However, this extension is still in a very early and, arguably, experimental phase. To that end, this work attempts to explain many of the concepts used by it, clarifying when it is most useful. Furthermore, micromaps can also grow at a frightening rate, quadrupling in size after each step in granularity. To that end, this work also presents a first attempt at compressing micromaps, reducing their size by up to 110 times in some practical scenarios.
Perspectives
Working on Opacity Micromaps was an interesting experience: Not only was I able to improve upon a concept that is in the early phases of standardization, I was also able to explain several parts in a better way such that others could use it even more readily.
Gustaf Waldemarson
Lunds Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Succinct Opacity Micromaps, Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, August 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3675385.
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