REAL-TIME DISTRIBUTED HYBRID RENDERING WITH HARDWARE-ACCELERATED RAY TRACING AND RASTERIZATION FOR INTERACTIVE APPLICATIONS

Abstract

This thesis presents novel contributions to the problem of real-time hybrid rendering for interactive applications, including new approaches for camera and lighting features like depth of field, motion blur and soft shadows approximated from signed distance fields. In particular, for thin-client games and VR applications, a 5G edge computing-enabled distributed rendering approach is introduced which leverages both powerful cloud infrastructure and local access devices for hybrid rendering while maintaining interactive frame rates. Our technique generates a more realistic visual output as compared to local rendering with rasterization only but adheres to performance budgets difficult for pure ray tracing approaches to meet.