物理渲染图形流水线以真实感为目标，通过物理原理对光线和场景之间的交互行为进行建模仿真，从而绘制出高度逼真的照片级图像，有望成为下一代主流实时图形渲染方法。但其计算复杂度高，且传统GPU设计面向光栅化渲染算法，物理渲染效率低下。随着集成电路技术的不断进步，目前最先进GPU的物理渲染能力与实时渲染还有十几倍的性能差距。通过定制设计来弥补这一性能差距具有非常高的可行性，这就意味着图形处理器即将跨越实时物理渲染的门槛，实时物理渲染的时代即将到来。本项目将顺应这一趋势，从处理器体系结构和底层硬件设计角度出发，将图形学领域最新物理渲染算法与近似计算、PIM等体系结构先进技术相结合，重点解决物理渲染编程模型、大规模光线并行处理、场景数据动态生成等高效硬件支持的设计优化问题，实现满足实时要求的物理渲染图形流水线。本项目的研究工作将为基于物理渲染未来图形处理器的实现提供体系结构关键理论与技术支撑。

The physical rendering pipeline aims to create a highly realistic photo level image by modeling and simulating the interaction between light and scene through physical principles, and is expected to become the mainstream real-time graphics rendering method of the next generation. But its computational complexity is very high, and the traditional GPU design is oriented to the rasterization rendering algorithm, so the efficiency of physical rendering is low. With the continuous progress of integrated circuit technology, the rendering ability of most advanced GPU has more than ten times performance gap for real-time physical rendering. It is highly feasible to make up for this performance gap through customized design, which means that graphics processors will soon cross the threshold of real-time physical rendering, and the era of real-time physical rendering is coming. This project will conform to this trend and satisfy the requirement of real-time physical rendering graphics pipeline from the perspective of processor architecture and hardware design. It combines the advanced algorithm of graphics rendering, the new approximate computing, and PIM technology. It focuses on solving the problem of physical rendering programming model, large-scale light parallel processing, hardware support for dynamic generation of scene data and so on. The research work of this project will provide the key theory and technical support for the implementation of the future physical rendering-based graphics processor.