A Distributed, Decoupled System for Losslessly Streaming Dynamic Light Probes to Thin Clients

TL;DR

This paper introduces a networked graphics system that efficiently streams high-quality global illumination data to thin clients, enabling real-time, high-fidelity rendering on low-power devices with minimal bandwidth use.

Contribution

It presents a novel distributed pipeline that computes diffuse global illumination remotely using irradiance volumes and lossless HEVC encoding, significantly reducing bandwidth while maintaining image quality.

Findings

Streams thousands of irradiance probes per second

Requires less than 50 Mbps bandwidth at 60 Hz

Reduces bandwidth by 99.4% compared to traditional methods

Abstract

We present a networked, high performance graphics system that combines dynamic, high quality, ray traced global illumination computed on a server with direct illumination and primary visibility computed on a client. This approach provides many of the image quality benefits of real-time ray tracing on low-power and legacy hardware, while maintaining a low latency response and mobile form factor. Our system distributes the graphic pipeline over a network by computing diffuse global illumination on a remote machine. Global illumination is computed using a recent irradiance volume representation combined with a novel, lossless, HEVC-based, hardware-accelerated encoding, and a perceptually-motivated update scheme. Our experimental implementation streams thousands of irradiance probes per second and requires less than 50 Mbps of throughput, reducing the consumed bandwidth by 99.4% when streaming at 60 Hz compared to traditional lossless texture compression. This bandwidth reduction allows higher quality and lower latency graphics than state-of-the-art remote rendering via video streaming. In addition, our split-rendering solution decouples remote computation from local rendering and so does not limit local display update rate or resolution.