Today's state-of-the-art real-time rendering system for handling massively complex micro-poly geometry is Nanite, which relies on a pre-computed hierarchy of compressed geometry clusters. Per frame, the hierarchy is evaluated to select a subset of clusters representing the right level of detail for the given view. The selected clusters are decompressed and finally rasterized. How to efficiently combine such a hierarchical level of detail selection with hardware accelerated ray tracing has been an open challenge as per-frame changing geometry will trigger slow acceleration structure rebuilds.
At the conference in High Performance Graphics this summer, researchers from Intel Graphics Research Organization (GRO) will present a new method which efficiently combines cluster decompression and acceleration structure rebuild, allowing to run Nanite-style hierarchical level of detail in real-time on desktop PCs.
To learn more about this technique, please follow the links below.