Release Notes

NVIDIA VXGI 0.9.

Global illumination (NVIDIA GI Works) is a way of computing lighting in the scene that includes indirect illumination, i.e. simulating objects that are lit by other objects as well as ideal light sources. Adding GI to the scene greatly improves the realism of the rendered images. Modern real-time rendering engines simulate indirect illumination using different approaches, which include precomputed light maps (offline GI), local light sources placed by artists, and simple ambient light.

What’s New

General

• Beta release

0.9.

1. Initial release featuring diffuse and rough specuar indirect lighting, with support for arbitrary dynamic scenes and area lights.
2. Supports Direct3D 11 only, but does not require any vendor-specific hardware features, works on any D3D11 capable hardware.
3. There are some known issues with image quality, specifically:

• Flickering can sometimes be observed when lit objects are moving uniformly;
• The intensity of light cast by small area lights can change when the camera moves towards or away from such lights;
• Diffuse illumination on geometry with lots of fine detail can be observed with some static screen-space noise, especially if diffuse illumination is computed with high sparsity;
• Reflections rendered with VXGI specular tracing are always blurry. VXGI cannot render perfect-mirror reflections.

4. Memory requirements can be adjusted between about 15 MB to 2.5 GB, with more expensive options taking more time to process and producing higher quality results.