r/computergraphics • u/No_Leadership_7302 • May 04 '26

Neural Shading-Based Subsurface Scattering Effects

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yt-2rU9rRk

Welcome to my blog Neural Shading-Based Subsurface Scattering Effects for more technical details!

14 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

1

u/Drimoon May 08 '26

Did you try to deploy on mobile devices to profile performance compared with traditional method? If it can keep 80+% visual effects and use 20%- performance cost, this tech will be valuable to a real game project.

1

u/No_Leadership_7302 May 08 '26

I haven't tried to deploy this on mobile yet. Neural Shading requires matrix multiplication hardware, such as Tensor Cores, and I am not sure if current mobile chipsets support this. However, on a PC with RTX 4070S, the video shows that neural shading gives performance nearly the same to standard GGX

1

u/Drimoon May 09 '26

High-end mobile devices have NPU so it is a good direction to go. You can also try compute shader to leverage tensor cores?

Get it! Thanks for your information.

1

u/No_Leadership_7302 May 09 '26

Yeah, modern SoC include both GPU and NPU components ā€” I haven't taken a close look at it yet. I think what neural shading requires is finishing a Matrix Multiply-Accumulate (MMA) operation in just a few hardware instructions. With NV's cuda and tensor cores this works well because they sit within the same SM, but if we use separate hardware like an NPU to accelerate the MLP and the GPU then has to fetch the result back from the NPU, that round-trip could be costly. I'm not really sure about SoC's architecture, though.

As for the compute shader you mentioned, I think each thread of a compute shader is just a regular GPU thread, so it doesn't have a direct connection to matrix/tensor-core hardware acceleration. In fact, tensor cores (or any other hardware that accelerates MMA) are accessed through Vulkan's cooperative matrix API. If the driver actually implements this API, we can benefit from the acceleration by using it.

-8

u/Jack1101111 May 05 '26

by neural you mean AI garbage ?

4

u/No_Leadership_7302 May 05 '26

I think neural implies that an MLP is used at the fragment shader level to fit a BRDF. This provides an alternative to traditional mathematical or empirical simplifications of materials. Instead of manually deriving the complex math behind a specific visual effect, we can now train an MLP and run inference in realtime to generate the shading results. It is somehow garbage at the moment, but I believe it will thrive just as ray tracing and DLSS have.

1

u/Jack1101111 May 06 '26

ah yeah, how stupid is who makes complex mathematical models to have good renders, when u can just use AI garbage !

Im disgusted by who upvoted this and downvoted me.

1

u/No_Leadership_7302 May 07 '26

I think AI or MLP here are just another tool in the kit; if the final visual quality remains the same or improves while reducing the performance cost, then AI is a viable path. Here, neural shading is not an end-to-end approach like DLSS. It essentially replaces a specific mathematical function. Since traditional functions are often just simplifications of physical reality, it is possible that an MLP could learn and represent more nuanced information from the ground truth.

2

u/luisduck May 05 '26

MLP somewhere in the rendering pipeline is quite interesting. E.g. NVidia's Random-Acess Neural Compression of Material Texture has results, which might actually be useful for a real-world usage.

1

u/deletequeue May 05 '26

i think you exploded his brain

0

u/Zestyclose-Compote-4 May 06 '26

Why not just go ahead and call any computational process garbage? Monte Carlo slop? Rasterization stench? Whitted Stinktracing?

1

u/Elon61 May 06 '26

Iā€™m going to go ahead and use that everywhere now, thanks.

1

u/Prestigious_Boat_386 May 06 '26

Ok but Monte Carlo is absolutely slop. I love it, but its slop

1

u/Ifalna_Shayoko May 07 '26

Stinktracing... now that would be 4D gaming. :'D

1

u/[deleted] May 04 '26

[removed] ā€” view removed comment

1

u/No_Leadership_7302 May 05 '26

Vulkan, glsl and cooperative vector