Accurate Real-Time Specular Reflections with Radiance Caching

We present an algorithm for perspective-correct, real-time specular illumination for surfaces of varying glossiness in dynamic environments. Our algorithm leverages properties from earlier techniques (e.g., radiance probes and screenspace reflections) while reducing the amount of visual errors by adding ray tracing to the rendering pipeline. Our algorithm extends previous work by allowing accurate reflections for all surfaces regardless of the material, and it has global coherence (i.e., there are no visible discontinuities). With radiance caching, multiple samples can be efficiently computed as the radiance computation is decoupled from the final shading. The radiance cache is also used to approximate the specular term for the roughest surfaces without any ray tracing.