Effect-based Multi-viewer Caching for Cloud-native Rendering

Abstract

With cloud computing becoming ubiquitous, it appears as virtually everything can be offered as-a-service. However, real-time rendering in the cloud forms a notable exception, where the cloud adoption stops at running individual game instances in compute centers. In this paper, we explore whether a cloud-native rendering architecture is viable and scales to multi-client rendering scenarios. To this end, we propose world-space and on-surface caches to share rendering computations among viewers placed in the same virtual world. We discuss how caches can be utilized on an effect-basis and demonstrate that a large amount of computations can be saved as the number of viewers in a scene increases. Caches can easily be set up for various effects, including ambient occlusion, direct illumination, and diffuse global illumination. Our results underline that the image quality using cached rendering is on par with screen-space rendering and due to its simplicity and inherent coherence, cached rendering may even have advantages in single viewer setups. Analyzing the runtime and communication costs, we show that cached rendering is already viable in multi-GPU systems. Building on top of our research, cloud-native rendering may be just around the corner.