Neff, ThomasBudge, BrianDong, ZhaoSchmalstieg, DieterSteinberger, MarkusBikker, JaccoGribble, Christiaan2023-06-252023-06-252023978-3-03868-229-52079-8687https://doi.org/10.2312/hpg.20231131https://diglib.eg.org:443/handle/10.2312/hpg20231131Recent advances in graphics hardware have enabled ray tracing to produce high-quality ambient occlusion (AO) in real-time, which is not plagued by the artifacts typically found in real-time screen-space approaches. However, the high computational cost of ray tracing remains a significant hurdle for low-power devices like standalone VR headsets or smartphones. To address this challenge, inspired by point-based global illumination and texture-space split rendering, we propose point-based split ambient occlusion (PSAO), a novel split-rendering system that streams points sparsely from server to client. PSAO first evenly distributes points across the scene, and then subsequently only transmits points that changed more than a given threshold, using an efficient hash grid to blend neighboring points for the final compositing pass on the client. PSAO outperforms recent texture-space shading approaches in terms of quality and required network bit rate, while demonstrating performance similar to commonly used lower-quality screen-space approaches. Our point-based split rendering representation lends itself to highly compressible signals such as AO and is scalable towards quality or bandwidth requirements by adjusting the number of points in the scene.Attribution 4.0 International LicenseCCS Concepts: Computing methodologies -> RenderingComputing methodologiesRendering10.2312/hpg.202311311-1111 pages