Advanced Rendering Research Group

This page is the home of the Advanced Rendering Research Group at AMD, working on research surrounding graphics and rendering. We look at current and future problems relating to CPU and GPU architectures.

Research topics we study include:

  • Real-time rendering algorithms.
  • Global illumination using ray tracing.
  • Application of Machine Learning to graphics. 

Some derivatives from our research activities are turned into some libraries and SDKs.

Our team members comprise a wide variety of people with different backgrounds, and we work together to find solutions to problems. The team is distributed all over the world in Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America.

Publications

During the problem-solving phase, we sometimes invent new technologies. We publish this research through academic channels so it can be used by others.

Here are some of our recent research papers:

Title Information Year
Hierarchical Light Sampling with Accurate Spherical Gaussian Lighting Yusuke Tokuyoshi, Sho Ikeda, Paritosh Kulkarni, and Takahiro Harada. SIGGRAPH ASIA 2024 Conference Papers [140MB]. (Supplementary document [125MB], Supplementary images [750MB]) 2024
HIPRT: A Ray Tracing Framework in HIP Daniel Meister, Paritosh Kulkarni, Aaryaman Vasishta, Takahiro Harada. High Performance Graphics 2024 [30MB] 2024
H-PLOC: Hierarchical Parallel Locally-Ordered Clustering for Bounding Volume Hierarchy Construction Carsten Benthin, Daniel Meister, Joshua Barczak, Rohan Mehalwal, John Tsakok, Andrew Kensler. High Performance Graphics 2024 [0.5MB] (Supplemental video [23MB]) 2024
Neural Texture Block Compression Shin Fujieda and Takahiro Harada, MAM-MANER Workshop at EGSR 2024 [43MB]. (Slides [1.5MB]) 2024
Efficient Visibility Reuse for Real-time ReSTIR Yusuke Tokuyoshi, SIGGRAPH 2024 Talks, Article 20 [11.5MB] (Slides PDF [52MB], Supplemental PDF [30MB], MP4 video [455MB]) 2024
Bounded VNDF Sampling for the Smith–GGX BRDF Yusuke Tokuyoshi* and Kenta Eto* (*Equal contributors), Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, Vol. 7, No. 1 (I3D 2024) (2024) [150MB] (Supplemental PDF [735KB], images [367MB]) 2024
GPU Programming Primitives for Computer Graphics (course) Daniel Meister, Atsushi Yoshimura, Chih-Chen Kao, SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 (Course notes PDF [1.3MB], course notes link) 2023
Bounded VNDF Sampling for Smith–GGX Reflections Kenta Eto* and Yusuke Tokuyoshi* (*Equal contributors), SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Technical Communications, Article 13 (Honorable Mention Award) (2023) (Supplemental PDF) 2023
Real-Time Rendering of Glossy Reflections Using Ray Tracing and Two-Level Radiance Caching
Kenta Eto, Sylvain Meunier, Takahiro Harada, Guillaume Boissé. SIGGRAPH Asia 2023. 2023
Local Positional Encoding for Multi-Layer Perceptrons Shin Fujieda, Atsushi Yoshimura, Takahiro Harada. Pacific Graphics 2023, Daejeon, South Korea (Supplemental PDF [28MB]) 2023
Introduction to GPU Radix Sort Takahiro Harada and Lee Howes, Heterogeneous Computing with OpenCL, 2011 2011
Neural Intersection Function Shin Fujieda, Chih-Chen Kao, Takahiro Harada, High Performance Graphics 2023 2023
Subspace Culling for Ray-Box Intersection Atsushi Yoshimura, Takahiro Harada, Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, vol. 6, no. 1, article 8 (Supplemental PDF [1MB]) 2023
Efficient Spatial Resampling Using the PDF Similarity Yusuke Tokuyoshi, Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, vol. 6, no. 1, article 4 (I3D 2023 Best Paper Runner-Up Award) (Slides [95MB], MP4 Video [785MB], Reference images [24MB]) 2023
Weighted À-Trous Linear Regression (WALR) for Real-Time Diffuse Indirect Lighting Denoising Sylvain Meunier, Takahiro Harada. AMD Technical Report No. 22-12-1c2e, December 15 2022. 2022
GI-1.0: A Fast and Scalable Two-level Radiance Caching Scheme for Real-time Global Illumination Guillaume Boissé, Sylvain Meunier, Heloise de Dinechin, Pieterjan Bartels, Alexander Veselov, Kenta Eto, Takahiro Harada.
Demo at SIGGRAPH 2022
(MP4 Video [173MB])
2022
Performance Comparison of Bounding Volume Hierarchies for GPU Ray Tracing Daniel Meister (AMD) and Jirí Bittner (Czech Technical University in Prague), Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques (JCGT), vol. 11, no. 4, 1-19 (PDF) 2022
Geometry and Texture Streaming Architecture in Radeon ProRender Atsushi Yoshimura, Sho Ikeda, Takahiro Harada
AMD Technical Report No. 22-10-daf5, October 13 2022
2022
Fused BVH to Ray Trace Level of Detail Meshes (Tech Report) Paritosh Kulkarni, Sho Ikeda, Takahiro Harada
AMD Technical Report, No. 22-10-b79d
2022
Fused BVH to Ray Trace Level of Detail Meshes Paritosh Kulkarni, Sho Ikeda, Takahiro Harada
SIGGRAPH ASIA 2022, to appear.
2022
Combining GPU Tracing Methods within a Single Ray Query Pieterjan Bartels, Takahiro Harada
SIGGRAPH ASIA 2022
2022
Progressive Material Caching Shin Fujieda, Takahiro Harada
SIGGRAPH ASIA 2022.
2022
HIP RT: A Ray Tracing Library in HIP Takahiro Harada, High Performance Graphics 2022 Hot3D [1.5MB] 2022
Accurate Diffuse Lighting from Spherical Gaussian Lights Yusuke Tokuyoshi, SIGGRAPH 2022 Posters [7MB]
(Supplemental PDF [124KB], MP4 Video [212MB])
2022
Compression and Interactive Visualization of Terabyte Scale Volumetric RGBA Data with Voxel-scale Details Mehmet Oguz Derin, Takahiro Harada, Yusuke Takeda, Yasuhiro Iba, SIGGRAPH 2022 Posters [7MB] 2022
Multi-Fragment Rendering for Glossy Bounces on the GPU Atsushi Yoshimura, Yusuke Tokuyoshi, Takahiro Harada, EGSR 2022 Industry Track [30MB]
(Presentation PDF [4MB])
2022
Stochastic Light Culling for Single Scattering in Participating Media Shin Fujieda, Yusuke Tokuyoshi, Takahiro Harada, Eurographics 2022 Short Papers [11MB]
(Supplemental PDF [360KB])
2022
Multi-Resolution Geometric Representation using BoundingVolume Hierarchy for Ray Tracing Sho Ikeda, Paritosh Kulkarni, Takahiro Harada, AMD Technical Report, No. 22-02-f322 [14MB] 2022
Tiled Reservoir Sampling for Many-Light Rendering Yusuke Tokuyoshi, AMD Technical Report, No. 21-11-ecdc [93MB] 2021
World-space spatiotemporal reservoir reuse for ray-traced global illumination Guillaume Boissé, SIGGRAPH Asia 2021 [33MB] 2021
Viewport-Resolution Independent Anti-Aliased Ray Marching on Interior Faces in Cube-Map Space Tianchen Xu, Wei Zeng, Enhua Wu, SIGGRAPH ASIA 2021 [8MB] 2021
Sparse Volume Rendering using Hardware Ray Tracing and Block Walking Mehmet Oguz Derin, Takahiro Harada, Yusuke Takeda, Yasuhiro Iba, SIGGRAPH Asia 2021 [27MB] 2021
Unbiased VNDF Sampling for Backfacing Shading Normals Yusuke Tokuyoshi, SIGGRAPH ’21: ACM SIGGRAPH 2021 Talks, Article No. 8, pp 1–2 (2021)
(Abstract PDF [19MB]Supplemental PDF [7MB])
2021
Hierarchical Russian Roulette for Vertex Connections Yusuke Tokuyoshi, Takahiro Harada, ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol. 38, Issue 4, No. 36, pp 1–12
(Paper PDF, Supplemental PDF 1PDF 2PDF 3PDF 4)
2019
Energy-efficient Global Illumination Algorithms for Mobile Devices using Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling Young J. Kim, SeongKi Kim, Takahiro Harada, Computers & Graphics Vol. 70, 198-205 2018
Bidirectional Path Tracing Using Backward Stochastic Light Culling Yusuke Tokuyoshi, Takahiro Harada, SIGGRAPH ’18: ACM SIGGRAPH 2018 Talks, Article No. 70, pp 1–2
(Abstract PDFSlides PDFSupplemental PDF)
2018
Stochastic Light Culling for VPLs on GGX Microsurfaces Yusuke Tokuyoshi, Takahiro Harada, Computer Graphics Forum, 36 (4), pp 55-63 (Paper PDFSlides PDFVideo MP4Supplemental PDF) 2017
Stochastic Light Culling Yusuke Tokuyoshi, Takahiro Harada, The Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp 35-60
(Paper PDFVideo 1 MP4Video 2 MP4)
2016
Texel shading Karl Hillesland, Jason Yang, EG ’16: Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the European Association for Computer Graphics: Short Paper, pp 73–76 2016
The quest for the ray tracing API A. Keller, I. Wald, T. Harada, D. Kozlov, R. Karrenberg, L. Peterson, T. Hector, SIGGRAPH ’16: ACM SIGGRAPH 2016 Courses, No. 25, pp 1 2016
A framework to transform in-core GPU algorithms to out-of-core algorithms Takahiro Harada, I3D ’16: Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games February, pp 179–180 2016
Semi-Static Load Balancing for Low Latency Ray Tracing on Heterogeneous Multiple GPUs Takahiro Harada, GPU Pro 7 2016
Simulation and rendering for millions of grass blades Zengzhi Fan, Hongwei Li, Karl Hillesland, Bin Sheng, i3D ’15: Proceedings of the 19th Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, pp 55–60 2015
Rendering Vector Displacement Mapped Surfaces in a GPU Ray Tracer Takahiro Harada, GPU Pro 6 2015
Two-Level Constraint Solver and Pipelined Local Batching for Rigid Body Simulation on GPUs Takahiro Harada, GPU Pro 5 2014
Ray Tracing Irregularly Distributed Samples on Multiple GPUs Takahiro Harada, Masahiro Fujita, High Performance Graphics Poster 2014
Micro-buffer Rasterization Reduction Method for Environment Lighting Using Point-based Rendering Takahiro Harada, Graphics Interface, pp 95-102 2014
Tridiagonal Matrix Formulation for Inextensible Hair Strand Simulation Dongsoo Han and Takahiro Harada, Workshop on Virtual Reality Interaction and Physical Simulation, pp 11-16 2016
Forward+: A Step Toward Film-style Shading in Real Time Takahiro Harada, Jay McKee, Jason C. Yang, GPU Pro 4 2013
Real-time Hair Simulation with Efficient Hair Style Preservation Dongsoo Han and Takahiro Harada, Workshop on Virtual Reality Interaction and Physical Simulation, pp 45-51 2012
Forward+: Bringing Deferred Lighting to the Next Level Takahiro Harada, Jay McKee, Jason C. Yang, Eurographics 2012 – Short Papers, pp 5-8 (2012) 2012
Recent Advances in Real-Time Collision and Proximity Computations for Games and Simulations Frye, Stephen and Harada, Takahiro and Kim, Young J. and Yoon, Sung-eui, Eurographics 2012 – Tutorials 2012
A 2.5D culling for Forward+ Takahiro Harada, SA ’12: SIGGRAPH Asia 2012 Technical Briefs, No. 18, pp 1–4 2012
A framework for rendering complex scattering effects on hair Xuan Yu, Jason C. Yang, Justin Hensley, Takahiro Harada, Jingyi Yu, I3D ’12: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, pp 111–118 2012
A space-efficient and hardware-friendly implementation of Ptex Sujeong Kim, Karl Hillesland, Justin Hensley, SA ’11: SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 Sketches, No.: 31, pp 1–2 2011
Heterogeneous particle-based simulation Takahiro Harada, SA ’11: SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 Sketches, No.: 19, pp 1–2 2011
Recent advances in real-time collision and proximity computations for games and simulations Sung-eui Yoon, Young J. Kim, Takahiro Harada, SA ’10: ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2010 Courses, No.: 22, pp 1–110 2010
Real-time collision culling of a million bodies on graphics processing units Fuchang Liu, Takahiro Harada, Youngeun Lee, Young J. Kim, ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol. 29, (6), No. 154, pp 1–8 2010
Real-time concurrent linked list construction on the GPU Jason C. Yang, Justin Hensley, Holger Grün, Nicolas Thibieroz, EGSR’10: Proceedings of the 21st Eurographics conference on Rendering, pp 1297-1304 2010

For the full list of our publications, visit our publications page here on GPUOpen:

Projects

Here are some of the projects our team has worked on, and have been made publicly available.

TressFX

The TressFX library is AMD’s hair/fur rendering and simulation technology. TressFX is designed to use the GPU to simulate and render high-quality, realistic hair and fur.

AMD Radeon Rays

Radeonâ„¢ Rays

The lightweight accelerated ray intersection library for DirectX®12 and Vulkan®.

AMD Radeon ProRender SDK

AMD Radeonâ„¢ ProRender SDK

AMD Radeonâ„¢ ProRender SDK is a powerful physically-based path traced rendering engine that enables creative professionals to produce stunningly photorealistic images.

AMD Radeon Image Filter

Radeonâ„¢ Image Filtering Library

Harness the power of machine learning to enhance images with denoising, enabling your application to produce high quality images in a fraction of the time traditional denoising filters take.

AMD Radeon ML

AMD Radeonâ„¢ ML

Radeonâ„¢ Machine Learning (Radeonâ„¢ ML or RML) is an AMD SDK for high-performance deep learning inference on GPUs.

AMD Orochi

Orochi

Orochi is a library which loads HIP and CUDA® APIs dynamically, allowing the user to switch APIs at runtime.

AMD HIP Ray Tracing

HIP Ray Tracing

HIP RT is a ray tracing library for HIP, making it easy to write ray tracing applications in HIP.

Radeon ProRender Inventor plugin

Rendering support for Radeon ProRender in Inventor, using USD and MaterialX technology. Artist and content creation tools using AMD’s technology, particularly Radeon ProRender.

Radeon ProRender Houdini plugin

Support in Houdini 19’s Solaris USD system for rendering via Radeon ProRender. Artist and content creation tools using Radeon ProRender.

Radeon ProRender Maya plugin

Rendering support for Radeon ProRender in Maya. Artist and content creation tools using AMD’s technology, particularly Radeon ProRender.

Radeon ProRender Blender plugin

Rendering support for Radeon ProRender in Blender. Artist and content creation tools using AMD’s technology, particularly Radeon ProRender.

MaterialX library

MaterialX Library is a collection of high-quality materials and related textures that is available completely for free.

AMD Capsaicin Framework

AMD Capsaicin Framework

Capsaicin is a Direct3D12 framework for real-time graphics research which implements the GI-1.0 technique and a reference path-tracer.

Recent videos

We produce videos to help others to understand our work better, or to go into more detail. Here are some of our recent videos:

Ray Tracing Research

AMD’s Ray Tracing Research

Watch this video digest of our recent ray tracing research, including efficient global illumination sampling, light sampling, and multi-resolution geometric representation.

Blogs

We regularly write blog posts sharing detailed information on our latest developments and research. Here’s some we’ve produced recently:

Blender USD Hydra

AMD USD™ Hydra™ plug-in for Blender®

Find out about our exciting new plug-in for Blender®, which uses the power of Open Standards to enable you to reference and assemble USD™, and use MaterialX.

Deformation Blur

New Radeon™ ProRender plug-in updates

Our Blender® add-on, Autodesk® Maya® plug-in, and the SideFX® Houdini™ (USD) plug-in now incorporate the latest Radeon™ ProRender SDK.

Recent news

Careers with the Advanced Rendering Research Group

And finally, we are always looking for fantastic people to join our research group. We are primarily looking for developers and researchers in and around graphics and machine learning. Feel free to reach out to the authors of the papers listed above if you are interested in joining our team, which may include the opportunity to work remotely. Our contact details can be found in these papers.

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