Restricted Extensions for GPU Photo-realistic Renderer

Abstract

Photo-realistic rendering systems on CPU traditionally have significant flexibility achieved mainly by the ability for end user to write custom plugins or shaders. The same cannot be said about majority of photo-realistic GPU renderers. Most «classic» approaches to design of user-extendable software on CPU, such as object-oriented plugins are not very well suited for GPU programming. In this paper we propose a restricted approach to developing extendable GPU rendering system at low development cost. Our hardware agnostic light-weight approach can be applied to existing rendering systems with minimal changes to them. We apply our approach to the problem of procedural textures implementation and show that, in addition to simplicity, our approach is faster then existing GPU solutions.