Perceptual model for adaptive local shading and refresh rate

Authors
Wolski, Krzysztof 
Myszkowski, Karol 
Mantiuk, Rafał K 

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Type
Article
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Abstract

When the rendering budget is limited by power or time, it is necessary to find the combination of rendering parameters, such as resolution and refresh rate, that could deliver the best quality. Variable-rate shading (VRS), introduced in the last generations of GPUs, enables fine control of the rendering quality, in which each 16×16 image tile can be rendered with a different ratio of shader executions. We take advantage of this capability and propose a new method for adaptive control of local shading and refresh rate. The method analyzes texture content, on-screen velocities, luminance, and effective resolution and suggests the refresh rate and a VRS state map that maximizes the quality of animated content under a limited budget. The method is based on the new content-adaptive metric of judder, aliasing, and blur, which is derived from the psychophysical models of contrast sensitivity. To calibrate and validate the metric, we gather data from literature and also collect new measurements of motion quality under variable shading rates, different velocities of motion, texture content, and display capabilities, such as refresh rate, persistence, and angular resolution. The proposed metric and adaptive shading method is implemented as a game engine plugin. Our experimental validation shows a substantial increase in preference of our method over rendering with a fixed resolution and refresh rate, and an existing motion-adaptive technique

Publication Date
2021-12
Online Publication Date
2021-12-10
Acceptance Date
Keywords
variable rate shading, motion quality, bandwidth-limited rendering
Journal Title
ACM Transactions on Graphics
Journal ISSN
0730-0301
1557-7368
Volume Title
40
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Sponsorship
European Research Council (725253)
European Commission Horizon 2020 (H2020) Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions (765911)