• Sampling improvements:

  • Better performance (lower rendering time and faster convergence)
  • More pleasing blue noise enabled when the total number of frames to be accumulated is known in advance and set as the targetFrames parameter at the framebuffer
  • Note a maximum of 64k samples is supported

• Improved denoiser image operation:

  • User-controlled quality levels via parameter quality
  • Optionally denoise alpha channel as well, enabled via parameter denoiseAlpha

• Support half-precision (16 bit float) texture formats OSP_TEXTURE_[RGBA16F|RGB16F|RA16F|R16F] and two-channel 32 bit float textures OSP_TEXTURE_RA32F

• New parameter limitIndirectLightSamples for the pathtracer which limits the number of light samples after the first non-specular (i.e., diffuse and glossy) bounce to at most one

• Implement MIP Mapping for better texture filtering. If the additional memory per texture needed cannot be spared, applications can disable the generation of MIP maps with device parameter disableMipMapGeneration

• The backplate (background texture) is now always sampled at the pixel center and thus not blurred by the pixel filter anymore

• Avoid color bleeding across eye-subimages when stereo rendering

• Superbuild uses binary packages of Open VKL

• Removed Intel ISPCRT dependency (ISPC compiler is still needed):

  • oneAPI Level Zero Loader is no longer necessary
  • zeContext and zeDevicedevice parameters are no longer supported
  • ispcrtContext and ispcrtDevicedevice parameters are no longer supported

• Clarify the size of OSP_BOOL to be 1 byte

• Fix artifacts occasionally appearing with gpu device

• The new minimum versions of dependencies:

  • Embree v4.3.3 (better error reporting)
  • Open Image Denoise v2.3 (better image quality with HIGH quality mode, added FAST quality mode)
  • rkcommon v1.14.0 Click for more details and example images: Braun KS 20 Coffee Maker by cekuhnen rendered with targetFrames=0 (white noise) and with targetFrames=1 (blue noise), and denoised respectively: ──────────────┬────────────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────── │white noise │blue noise

──────────────┼────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────── pixelSamples=8│BraunKS20_spp8_white │BraunKS20_spp8_blue
──────────────┼────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────── denoised │BraunKS20_spp8_white_denoised │BraunKS20_spp8_blue_denoised
──────────────┴────────────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────────── Contemporary Bathroom rendered with pixelSamples=16 and denoised with OSP_DENOISER_QUALITY_LOW, OSP_DENOISER_QUALITY_MEDIUM, and OSP_DENOISER_QUALITY_HIGH: ─────────────────┬────────────────────────┬────────────────────────┬───────────────────────── Bath_spp16 │Bath_spp16_dn_low │Bath_spp16_dn_med │Bath_spp16_dn_high
─────────────────┴────────────────────────┴────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────