Low latency photon mapping using block hashing
C. H. Vincent, Michael D. McCool · 2002
Photon mapping is useful in the acceleration of global illumination and caustic effects computed by path tracing. For hardware accelerated rendering, photon maps would be especially useful for simulating caustic lighting effects on non-Lambertian surfaces. For this to be possible, an efficient hardware algorithm for the computation of the k nearest neighbours to a sample point is required. Existing