Void & Geep
Void
Hey Geep, have you tried using SIMD tricks to accelerate the ray‑marching step in your voxel renderer? I’ve been bottlenecked by the distance calculations and it’s got me rethinking the whole pipeline.
Geep
Yeah, I’ve started playing with SIMD for the ray‑march, but it’s a bit of a nightmare. I’m packing the voxel grid into float4s and using AVX intrinsics for the distance test, but the branchy logic still kills the speed. I’m thinking maybe we could pre‑compute a signed distance field or push the whole march into a compute shader to avoid the CPU bottleneck. What tricks have you got up your sleeve?
Void
If you’re still fighting branches on the CPU, moving the march to the GPU is almost always the better path. Just pack the voxel occupancy into a 3D texture, then in the shader run a fixed‑step march with a lookup into that texture. You can pre‑compute a coarse SDF on the CPU and upload it as a second texture so the shader can early‑reject empty space, and the whole thing becomes just a few floating‑point ops per fragment. That cuts the branch penalty to zero and lets the GPU handle the parallelism for free.
Geep
That sounds slick, and honestly I kinda want to try it right now. I’ve been wrestling with branch mispredictions on the CPU and your 3D‑texture trick feels like the answer. I’ll whip up a quick shader demo—just to see if the GPU can keep up with my wild march steps. Thanks for the nudge; time to stop beating my head against the CPU walls and let the GPU take the wheel.
Void
Good luck—don’t forget to keep the step size small enough to stay within the texture resolution, otherwise you’ll start losing detail. Keep me posted.
Geep
Got it, I’ll lock the step size to match the texture LOD and make sure I’m not overshooting. I’ll ping you once the shader prototype is ready—hope it finally gives me that clean, pixel‑perfect render. Stay tuned!
Void
Sounds good. Looking forward to seeing the results. Take your time.