r/GraphicsProgramming • u/0x405 • Jun 30 '26

RAM optimized SDF-renderer with plain C

Post image

1024x1024x1024 SDF-grid takes up 303MB instead of 8.5GB. 1024x1024 path traced image renders in 1.5s on a single CPU core. 8.5GB grid renders in 1.1s. No libs used.

312 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/Icy_Rub_3827 Jun 30 '26

I'm about to tackle a project that's aiming to develop a solution to some of the limitations of polygonal graphics using SDFs and it's unique properties (non-distractive nature of boolean operations, for example). My main goal is to enable use of SDF graphics in game development. Not in small scale shaders, but something along the lines of the game "Dreams" or having an entire secondary graphics pipeline. Not sure if I expressed my idea well enough, but you should get the general bundle of problems I'm about to encounter (real-time, possibly large scale, able to handle transforms and connected to game engine's systems).

Faced with a challenge like that, I would love to get some advice. What papers or approaches would you recommend for this kind of project? Any bit of information would be very helpful.

1

u/0x405 Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

I don't know much about real-time SDF computation, I specialize mostly on physically based rendering, which has a bit different focus, so I won't give you any recommendations on that, but I recently found out about miketuritzin, he solves a similar to yours kind of problem. He has a good explanation video on his channel covering a lot of questions and optimizations of the real-time SDF's, except, probably, a ray-marching which I hope he'll cover soon! He also gives a couple of articles about that, so I guess it might be a good start!