This feature takes some inspiration from
"RenderMan: An Advanced Path Tracing Architecture for Movie Rendering" and
"A Hierarchical Automatic Stopping Condition for Monte Carlo Global Illumination"
The basic principle is as follows:
While samples are being added to a pixel, the adaptive sampler writes half
of the samples to a separate buffer. This gives it two separate estimates
of the same pixel, and by comparing their difference it estimates convergence.
Once convergence drops below a given threshold, the pixel is considered done.
When a pixel has not converged yet and needs more samples than the minimum,
its immediate neighbors are also set to take more samples. This is done in order
to more reliably detect sharp features such as caustics. A 3x3 box filter that
is run periodically over the tile buffer is used for that purpose.
After a tile has finished rendering, the values of all passes are scaled as if
they were rendered with the full number of samples. This way, any code operating
on these buffers, for example the denoiser, does not need to be changed for
per-pixel sample counts.
Reviewed By: brecht, #cycles
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D4686
This patch puts threads that render the same pixel closer together,
as opposed to threads that render the same sample. Thus threads
within a warp are more coherent in memory access and control flow,
leading to performance improvements.
Example benchmarks on a Quadro RTX4000 (WDDM) on Windows 10:
Koro: 4:23 -> 3:46
BMW: 1:18 -> 1:25
Barbershop Interior: 17:52 -> 14:55
Classroom: 4:37 -> 3:45
Performance differences on OpenCL/AMD were hit and miss, some scenes
became faster, others lost significantly. Therefore, this is kept as
CUDA only change for now.
This does a few things at once:
- Refactors host side split kernel logic into a new device
agnostic class `DeviceSplitKernel`.
- Removes tile splitting, a new work pool implementation takes its place and
allows as many threads as will fit in memory regardless of tile size, which
can give performance gains.
- Refactors split state buffers into one buffer, as well as reduces the
number of arguments passed to kernels. Means there's less code to deal
with overall.
- Moves kernel logic out of OpenCL kernel files so they can later be used by
other device types.
- Replaced OpenCL specific APIs with new generic versions
- Tiles can now be seen updating during rendering
This commit contains all the work related on the AMD megakernel split work
which was mainly done by Varun Sundar, George Kyriazis and Lenny Wang, plus
some help from Sergey Sharybin, Martijn Berger, Thomas Dinges and likely
someone else which we're forgetting to mention.
Currently only AMD cards are enabled for the new split kernel, but it is
possible to force split opencl kernel to be used by setting the following
environment variable: CYCLES_OPENCL_SPLIT_KERNEL_TEST=1.
Not all the features are supported yet, and that being said no motion blur,
camera blur, SSS and volumetrics for now. Also transparent shadows are
disabled on AMD device because of some compiler bug.
This kernel is also only implements regular path tracing and supporting
branched one will take a bit. Branched path tracing is exposed to the
interface still, which is a bit misleading and will be hidden there soon.
More feature will be enabled once they're ported to the split kernel and
tested.
Neither regular CPU nor CUDA has any difference, they're generating the
same exact code, which means no regressions/improvements there.
Based on the research paper:
https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications/laine2013hpg_paper.pdf
Here's the documentation:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LuXW-CV-sVJkQaEGZlMJ86jZ8FmoPfecaMdR-oiWbUY/edit
Design discussion of the patch:
https://developer.blender.org/T44197
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D1200
