Untitled Document
Not a member yet? Register for full benefits!

Username
Password
 Hardware-accelerated global illumination by image space photon mapping

This story is from the category Graphics
Printer Friendly Version
Email to a Friend (currently Down)

 

 

Date posted: 24/12/2009

Research presented in a paper by Morgan McGuire, assistant professor of computer science at Williams College, and co-author Dr. David Luebke of NVIDIA, introduces a new algorithm to improve computer graphics for video games.

McGuire and Luebke have developed a new method for computerizing lighting and light sources that will allow video game graphics to approach film quality.

Their paper "Hardware-Accelerated Global Illumination by Image Space Photon Mapping" won a Best Paper award at the 2009 Conference on High Performance Graphics.

Because video games must compute images more quickly than movies, video game developers have struggled with maximizing graphic quality.

Producing light effects involves essentially pushing light into the 3D world and pulling it back to the pixels of the final image. The method created by McGuire and Luebke reverses the process so that light is pulled onto the world and pushed into the image, which is a faster process.

As video games continue to increase the degree of interactivity, graphics processors are expected to become 500 times faster than they are now. McGuire and Luebke's algorithm is well suited to the quickened processing speed, and is expected to be featured in video games within the next two years.

See the full Story via external site: www.physorg.com



Most recent stories in this category (Graphics):

23/10/2012: How fear skews our spatial perception

30/09/2012: Taking mathematics to heart

07/09/2012: An Open Platform Improves Biomedical-Image Processing

10/08/2012: NASA's Curiosity Beams Back a Color 360 of Mars' Gale Crater

08/08/2012: What Makes Paris Look Like Paris? Software Finds Stylistic Core

08/08/2012: First BOSS Data: 3-D Map of 500,000 Galaxies, 100,000 Quasars

03/08/2012: Writing Graphics Software Gets Much Easier: New Programming Language Yields Code That’s Much Shorter and Clearer -- But Also Faster

02/08/2012: Software helps print video game characters in 3D