Ray direction is assumed to be normalized in such areas as scaling intersection
distance on instance push/pop when doing ray-scene intersection, but it was
possible that some closures wouldn't give normalized direction which could cause
wrong intersection checks.
Now normalization will happen on surface bounce, which could be a bit of a waste
if closure actually gives normalized direction, but currently only transparent
BSDF seems to give guaranteed normalized direction.
This commit contains all the work related on the AMD megakernel split work
which was mainly done by Varun Sundar, George Kyriazis and Lenny Wang, plus
some help from Sergey Sharybin, Martijn Berger, Thomas Dinges and likely
someone else which we're forgetting to mention.
Currently only AMD cards are enabled for the new split kernel, but it is
possible to force split opencl kernel to be used by setting the following
environment variable: CYCLES_OPENCL_SPLIT_KERNEL_TEST=1.
Not all the features are supported yet, and that being said no motion blur,
camera blur, SSS and volumetrics for now. Also transparent shadows are
disabled on AMD device because of some compiler bug.
This kernel is also only implements regular path tracing and supporting
branched one will take a bit. Branched path tracing is exposed to the
interface still, which is a bit misleading and will be hidden there soon.
More feature will be enabled once they're ported to the split kernel and
tested.
Neither regular CPU nor CUDA has any difference, they're generating the
same exact code, which means no regressions/improvements there.
Based on the research paper:
https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications/laine2013hpg_paper.pdf
Here's the documentation:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LuXW-CV-sVJkQaEGZlMJ86jZ8FmoPfecaMdR-oiWbUY/edit
Design discussion of the patch:
https://developer.blender.org/T44197
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D1200
* Volume multiple importace sampling support to combine equiangular and distance
sampling, for both homogeneous and heterogeneous volumes.
* Branched path "Sample All Direct Lights" and "Sample All Indirect Lights" now
apply to volumes as well as surfaces.
Implementation note:
For simplicity this is all done with decoupled ray marching, the only case we do
not use decoupled is for distance only sampling with one light sample. The
homogeneous case should still compile on the GPU because it only requires fixed
size storage, but the heterogeneous case will be trickier to get working.