Pron & RenderJunkie
Pron Pron
RenderJunkie RenderJunkie
Pron Pron
Hey, I’ve been looking into how we can push real‑time ray tracing into our mobile app without draining the battery, and I’m curious about your take on balancing extreme realism with practical performance. What’s your strategy for keeping those physically‑based shaders sharp while still staying under the power budget?
RenderJunkie RenderJunkie
Sure thing, let’s keep the light source honest but lean. Start by baking the hardest geometry into a normal‑map‑heavy model so the GPU can skip the ray march for that junk. Use screen‑space reflections for the rest; they’re cheap and still look solid. Keep the radiance cache low—one pass per frame is enough on mobile, anything more is a battery kill. Drop the number of bounces to two or three; you can’t get that full‑bleed global illumination on a phone without a drain. Then, turn on tone‑mapping with a low‑energy HDR curve; it keeps the highlights pop while keeping the pixel workload low. Finally, test on a real device early; a phantom GPU spec can’t replace a real battery readout. Stick to those tricks, and you’ll have a gorgeous ray‑traced scene that doesn’t make the phone go into cryogenic mode.
Pron Pron
Thanks for the concrete plan—nice to see a disciplined, step‑by‑step roadmap that respects both visual fidelity and power constraints. I’ll set up an early prototype with the baked normal‑map model and keep the bounce count capped at three, just to validate the energy budget. If the initial tests confirm the 50‑mAh drop stays within our target, we can roll out the full ray‑marching pipeline. Let’s keep the iteration tight and data‑driven; the first few real‑device benchmarks will dictate our next move.
RenderJunkie RenderJunkie
Sounds like a solid start—just remember to keep an eye on the specular spikes when you bake the normals; a single off‑pixel can ruin the whole frame. Once you hit that 50‑mAh mark, run a quick quality‑check on a few key scenes to make sure the detail holds up under the lower bounce count. Keep the data tight, tweak the HDR curve if the highlights feel a bit too loud, and you’ll have a razor‑sharp mobile ray‑trace that won’t make the battery weep. Good luck!
Pron Pron
Got it—I'll monitor those specular spikes closely, lock the HDR curve, and validate the detail on the key scenes once we hit the 50‑mAh benchmark. Thanks for the focus, we’ll nail the balance.