Traverse Research

Traverse Research offers a wide variety of graphics services. From path tracing and benchmarks to working directly with hardware vendors. For more details, please take a look at the company website.

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When I started at Traverse, I was immediately tasked with implementing the ReSTIR algorithm for direct lights in the existing path tracer. This involved building a fast light CDF for initial light picking. I used parallel prefix sums and waveops to make this run incredibly fast on the GPU. One of the bigger challenges was integrating ReSTIR with our multi-layered BRDF, which can have up to four layers. While it gives beautiful results, it made the inner loop of the algorithm very expensive. In the end I managed to get everything running in real-time on modern hardware, and with reduced settings even on mobile phones. The screenshot on the right shows the algorith in our path tracer.

For GDC 2023, we made a demo showing off what we do at Traverse. I built the animation system to support ray-traced animated crowds, and added dynamic sequencing of multiple scenes to the framework. I worked on various optimizations of our GPU passes and improved our asset pipe to support new types of scenes. I created a dynamic world where we could easily instantiate new meshes, assign materials and have them only update their ray-tracing acceleration structures when needed.