CloudLight: A system for amortizing indirect lighting in real-time rendering

We introduce CloudLight, a system for computing indirect lighting in the Cloud to support real-time rendering for interactive 3D ap- plications on a user's local device. CloudLight maps the traditional graphics pipeline onto a distributed system. That differs from a single-machine renderer in three fundamental ways. First, the map- ping introduces potential asymmetry between computational re- sources available at the Cloud and local device sides of the pipeline. Second, compared to a hardware memory bus, the network intro- duces relatively large latency and low bandwidth between certain pipeline stages. Third, for multi-user virtual environments, a Cloud solution can amortize expensive global illumination costs across users. Our new CloudLight framework explores tradeoffs in differ- ent partitions of the global illumination workload between Cloud and local devices, with an eye to how available network and com- putational power influence design decisions and image quality. We describe the tradeoffs and characteristics of mapping three known lighting algorithms to our system and demonstrate scaling for up to 50 simultaneous CloudLight users.

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