Skip to content

Caustica Rework 0.1.0

Choose a tag to compare

View all tags
@altairflyy altairflyy released this 09 Sep 20:53
rework-0.1.0
a03fa61

Caustica Rework 0.1.0

Caustica Rework is a heavily reworked direct fork of Caustica focused on a cleaner Vulkan ray-tracing architecture, explicit GPU resource ownership and lifetime management, and modern reconstruction/rendering paths.

Highlights

  • Decoupled Architecture: RtComposite reduced from universal GPU owner to lightweight orchestration and pass delegation.
  • Dedicated Ownership Domains: Clear, isolated lifecycle boundaries for WorldTraceResources, TraceFrameResources, FrameGenerationResources, and PostProcessing.
  • Explicit GPU Lifetime & Retirement: Strict deferred deletion queue with frame-tail retirement synchronization, preventing in-flight GPU execution races.
  • Clean Shutdown & Level Transitions: Guaranteed GPU device quiescence (�kDeviceWaitIdle) prior to tearing down resource domains on level change or exit.
  • Frame Pipeline & RenderGraph: Explicit macro-pass dependency scheduling with automated cross-queue barrier synthesis.

Rendering & Reconstruction

  • Vulkan Ray Tracing: Native Vulkan hardware path-traced world rendering with modular scene assembly.
  • Dual Reconstruction Backends: Production support for NVIDIA DLSS Ray Reconstruction and native, vendor-agnostic SVGF denoising.
  • Advanced Lighting: Spatio-temporal ReSTIR direct light sampling and SHaRC spatial hash radiance caching for multi-bounce indirect illumination.
  • Materials: Physically based LabPBR 1.3 material support with metallic, roughness, normal maps, and subsurface scattering.
  • Color & Presentation: Native HDR10/PQ (BT.2020) presentation on supported platforms alongside standard calibrated SDR display tone mapping.
  • Translucency: High-fidelity refraction and transmission for water and stained glass.

Architecture

text RtComposite ??? WorldTraceResources (AS manager, static/dynamic scene buffers) ??? TraceFrameResources (per-frame tracing targets, G-buffers) ??? FrameGenerationResources (optical flow, UI/HUD capture masks) ??? PostProcessing (SDR tone mapping, HDR10/PQ presentation) ??? Reconstruction Backends (DLSS Ray Reconstruction, native SVGF) ??? Lighting Systems (ReSTIR reservoir sampling, SHaRC cache) ??? SceneAssembler (terrain, entities, particles, weather) ??? TemporalState (motion vectors, camera history, reset tracking) ??? GraphExecution (macro-pass dependencies, automatic barrier synthesis)

RtComposite now orchestrates instead of universally owning GPU resources. Each migrated domain has a single semantic owner. Potentially in-flight resources use explicit completion/retirement authority. Shutdown establishes GPU quiescence before owner teardown.

Qualification & Validation

The rework underwent rigorous, gate-driven qualification:

  • Test Suite: 266 total tests, 262 passing, exact 4 canonical known failures (pre-existing upstream baseline suites), 0 unexpected failures.
  • Characterization: 7/7 characterization benchmarks PASS.
  • V2 Clean Build: Full compilation and shader validation PASS.
  • Performance: Matched CPU frame dispatch (no CPU regression), composite GPU path verified without regression, and VRAM footprint maintained within strict thresholds.
  • Full-Frame GPU Benchmark: Full end-to-end GPU frame timing benchmark is OUT OF SCOPE / NOT REQUIRED for this functional baseline release.

Scope & Waivers

  • NRD Scope: NVIDIA Real-Time Denoisers (NRD) is experimental, quarantined behind
    t/reconstruction/experimental/nrd/, and OUT OF TARGET / NOT REQUIRED for production.
  • Compatibility & Upscaling Waivers: Integration code for Distant Horizons (DH), Voxy LOD, AMD FSR 3, and Intel XeSS is present in the codebase where applicable, but runtime qualification of these paths is covered under authorized waivers and excluded from the production qualification baseline.

Building from Source

NVIDIA DLSS / NGX runtime binaries (
vngx_dlss.dll,
vngx_dlssd.dll) are proprietary and are not stored in the public source repository. Developers building from source must supply the supported DLSS_SDK environment variable pointing to the official NVIDIA DLSS SDK. Refer to README.md for build instructions.

Upstream

For detailed architectural and task reports, refer to docs/rewrite/FINAL_REPORT.md and docs/rewrite/FINAL-GATE-result.md.

Verified Binary Release

  • File: caustica-0.1.0.jar
  • Source commit: a03fa611abb4bab2ef099d7ed4417ab852046b01
  • SHA256: 6889c7eb8ceb0d8fa05d3032ad6aeef0e7cbd3f15cb2f849cb6ccb02ebe7638e
Assets 3
Loading