Visual Computing Guest Lecture: Path Tracing Technology in Alan Wake 2

Path Tracing Technology in Alan Wake 2

Juha Sjöholm (NVIDIA)
Kiya Kandar (Remedy Entertainment)

Abstract: On this special guest lecture on CS-E5520 Advanced Computer Graphics, Juha Sjöholm (sr. developer technology engineer at NVIDIA) and Kiya Kandar (Graphics Programmer at Remedy Entertainment) share the details on the real-time lighting simulation technology that makes Remedy’s Alan Wake 2 one of the best-looking computer games of all time.

Starting with a brief introduction to realistic lighting simulation using path tracing, this lecture explains all aspects of the game’s path tracer, including acceleration structure management with large amounts of dynamic content, representation and accessing of material data, light sampling techniques, and image upscaling and denoising methods.

All key technologies are covered including using of the opacity micromaps (OMM) with alpha tested assets such as vegetation and hair, use of the shader execution reordering (SER) in the path tracing shader, how the DLSS Ray Reconstruction is used to produce the final image, and how smooth frame rates are achieved through the DLSS Frame Generation.

This guest lecture is hosted by Associate Professor Jaakko Lehtinen, Department of Computer Science.