Physically-Based Materials – Energy Conservation and Reciprocity

Physically-based materials are easy to use and ensure consistent appearance across different rendering algorithms. This post shows the math behind it and describes why sticking to the physical principles of the light transport is the key to cross-renderer consistency.

Vectorizing smallpt with ispc

Today’s processors can do a lot of work in parallel on a single core. Programs need to be specifically designed for that, as this functionality is exposed via specialized instructions such as SSE or AVX instructions on x86 processors. By operating on wide registers storing vectors instead of scalars, a single SSE or AVX vector