Realtidsrendering

Realtidsrendering (real-time rendering) is the generation of images at interactive frame rates for dynamic scenes, enabling immediate visual feedback to user input. It targets roughly 30 to over 100 frames per second with low latency, as seen in games, virtual reality and simulators.

Most real-time rendering uses GPU rasterization, where the pipeline processes vertices, builds primitives, rasterizes fragments and applies shading. Programmable stages and shader languages such as HLSL or GLSL support techniques including deferred or forward rendering, texture mapping, shadows and post-processing. Physically based materials and simplified lighting models are common, with approximate global illumination from screen-space effects, light probes or voxel-based methods, aided by temporal reprojection.

Hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing has emerged to improve realism by computing reflections, shadows and lighting with dedicated cores. Many engines use hybrid pipelines that combine rasterization with ray tracing or other GI techniques. Real-time path tracing exists in development builds, but remains compute-intensive; denoising, compositing and AI upscaling help produce plausible results within interactivity budgets.

Applications include video games, VR/AR, architectural and product visualization, automotive design and training simulations. Real-time rendering relies on APIs such as DirectX, Vulkan and Metal and benefits from advancing hardware features.

Key challenges include balancing quality and performance, managing memory bandwidth and latency, handling dynamic scenes, and ensuring cross-platform consistency. Ongoing work focuses on improving GI fidelity, temporal stability and tooling.