Light Path Guided Culling for Hybrid Real-Time Path Tracing

Rendering visually convincing images requires realistic lighting. Path tracing has long been used in offline rendering to produce photorealistic images. While recent hardware advancements allow ray tracing methods to be employed in real-time renderers, they come with a significant performance and memory impact. Real-time path tracing remains a challenge. We present light path guided culling (LiPaC), a novel culling algorithm for ray tracing that achieves almost optimal culling results by considering the number of light paths encountered by objects. In addition, we describe a hybrid path tracing pipeline using LiPaC to render large and highly dynamic scenes in real-time on the current generation of consumer hardware.