Speeding Up Lighthouse 2

[JeGX]

Last week an updated version of the Lighthouse 2 benchmark was released. This version is about 15% faster, and produces images with less noise. In fact, rendering 10 paths per pixels (samples per pixel, or spp) takes as long as it took the February 27 version of the benchmark to render 8spp. At the same time, the quality of the 10spp version exceeds the image quality of the 24spp version in the February 27 package. Yesterday I committed the improved source code. In this blog post I will discuss the changes that resulted in the improved performance and quality. Many of these changes should apply to other renders, and, in fact, to GPGPU applications in general.

Links
- Full article
- source code @ github
- Lighthouse2 / RTX path tracing benchmark thread @ Geeks3D