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Computer Graphics Forum

Temporal Coherence Methods in Real-Time Rendering

Daniel Scherzer, Lei Yang, Oliver Mattausch, Diego Nehab, Pedro V. Sander, Michael Wimmer, and Elmar Eisemann

Real-time rendering applications exhibit a considerable amount of spatio-temporal coherence. This is true for camera motion, as in the Parthenon sequence (left), as well as animated scenes such as the Heroine (middle) and Ninja (right) sequences. Diagrams to the right of each rendering show disoccluded points in red, in contrast to points that were visible in the previous frame, which are shown in green (i.e. green points are available for reuse). [Images courtesy of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., Sunnyvale, California, USA]

Nowadays, there is a strong trend towards rendering to higher-resolution displays and at high frame rates. This development aims at delivering more detail and better accuracy, but it also comes at a significant cost. Although graphics cards continue to evolve with an ever-increasing amount of computational power, the speed gain is easily counteracted by increasingly complex and sophisticated shading computations. For real-time applications, the direct consequence is that image resolution and temporal resolution are often the first candidates to bow to the performance constraints (e.g. although full HD is possible, PS3 and XBox often render at lower resolutions). In order to achieve high-quality rendering at a lower cost, one can exploit temporal coherence (TC). The underlying observation is that a higher resolution and frame rate do not necessarily imply a much higher workload, but a larger amount of redundancy and a higher potential for amortizing rendering over several frames. In this survey, we investigate methods that make use of this principle and provide practical and theoretical advice on how to exploit TC for performance optimization. These methods not only allow incorporating more computationally intensive shading effects into many existing applications, but also offer exciting opportunities for extending high-end graphics applications to lower-spec consumer-level hardware. To this end, we first introduce the notion and main concepts of TC, including an overview of historical methods. We then describe a general approach, image-space reprojection, with several implementation algorithms that facilitate reusing shading information across adjacent frames. We also discuss data-reuse quality and performance related to reprojection techniques. Finally, in the second half of this survey, we demonstrate various applications that exploit TC in real-time rendering.

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Citation

Daniel Scherzer, Lei Yang, Oliver Mattausch, Diego Nehab, Pedro V. Sander, Michael Wimmer, and Elmar Eisemann, Temporal Coherence Methods in Real-Time Rendering, Computer Graphics Forum, 31, pp. 2378–2408, 2012.

BibTex

@article{bib:scherzer:2012,
    author       = { Scherzer, Daniel and Yang, Lei and Mattausch, Oliver and Nehab, Diego and Sander, Pedro V. and Wimmer, Michael and Eisemann, Elmar },    
    title        = { Temporal Coherence Methods in Real-Time Rendering },
    journal      = { Computer Graphics Forum },
    volume       = { 31 },
    year         = { 2012 },
    pages        = { 2378--2408 },
    doi          = { 10.1111/j.1467-8659.2012.03075.x },
    dblp         = { journals/cgf/ScherzerYMNSWE12 },
    url          = { https://publications.graphics.tudelft.nl/papers/312 },
}