Global Illumination for Advanced Computer Graphics

Real-time 3D graphics is present today on various devices, from high-end PC powered by highly complex GPUs to more simple handheld consoles or mobile phones. All these solutions are based on an aging technique called immediate mode rasterization, very efficient for rendering simple scenes, but unable to capture essential visual features such as soft shadows, indirect lighting, real reflection and refractions, caustics, etc. Only global illumination algorithms are able to render such features. Moreover, the rendering time of a GPU increases linearly with the scene complexity, whereas a ray tracing solution shows a logarithmic progression. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of such global illumination algorithms, their common theoretical background and the advancements made to execute them in real-time.