HIGHLIGHTS

• Environment map refactor: dynamic procedural skies, higher resolutions, runtime texture compression and baking of directional lights now supported.
• SDK updates bringing feature, image quality improvements and bug fixes.
• Various smaller path tracer updates and features.

DETAILS

Features and changes

• Grand environment map refactor:
  • Switched to cubemaps as the backing & sampling format (was previously equirectangular 2D texture).
  • Added support for dynamic update and added a procedural environment example based on https://github.com/NVIDIA/Q2RTX sky & clouds.
  • Upgraded importance sampling and RTXDI bridge code to support cubemaps and dynamic environments.
  • Support for importing high res pre-baked .dds cubemap environments (in addition to equirectangular).
  • Support for dynamic GPU-based BC6U compression.
  • All positionless directional-only analytical lights are now automatically baked into environment map, simplifying the lighting code.
  • Added variants of existing scenes with enabled procedural sky.
  • Added a large number of high resolution example environment maps in cubemap format (4096 x 4096 x 6, BC6U) to the media repository.
• Shader compiler now using ShaderMake.
• Updated to DXC HLSL compiler v1.7.2308 and fixed & switched all shaders to HLSL 2021.
• Updated to Streamline v2.2.1 with various performance optimizations and bug fixes.
• Updated to latest RTXDI sdk-only branch which includes various fixes and refactoring from v2.1.0.
• Updated to newer NRD version v4.3.6 with a number of image quality upgrades and fixes.
• Added optional shadow rays NoL fadeout (exposed as part of material options) useful in hiding self-shadowing artifacts with low-poly geometry.
• Added support for the new Bounded VNDF sampling.
• Added ability to boost NEE light sampling for primary surface (exposed as UI option).
• Experimental automated image based regression testing. ​

Bug fixes

• Vulkan stability fixes.
• OMM memory leak and stability fixes.
• Various UI and other smaller fixes.
• Fixed tangent space being wrong with normalmaps in certain cases, causing incorrect lighting. ​

Known issues

• Vulkan port has some missing features such as SER and BC6U runtime compression for environment maps