HPG 2025 Student Competition

This year, the HPG Student Competition honors one of the most influential HPG papers from the last 10 years, SVGF from 2017:

Spatiotemporal Variance-Guided Filtering: Real-Time Reconstruction for Path-Traced Global Illumination by Schied et al., https://research.nvidia.com/labs/rtr/publication/schied2017spatiotemporal.

The paper has over 100 citations and more than a thousand downloads just from the ACM digital library. It also won the Best Paper prize. Even though there are many follow-up works, the original SVGF has survived the test-of-time and is still very relevant today.

This year, we call upon submissions of original implementations or applications of the SVGF algorithm or in combination with the SVGF with other techniques.

We are mainly looking for creativity and originality, but we also want the participants to take into account the cost of their contributions in several aspects.

We will judge the submission based on the following:

• Originality (main component)
• Brevity
• Performance
• Memory use
• Joule per pixel (if you can specify this)
• A supporting poster explaining your work

The competition is open to all students. This includes applied science and Ph.D. / doctoral students.

Prizes:

The three best submissions will be invited to join us on stage at HPG’25 in Copenhagen. They will get free registration for HPG‘25. Other prizes may become available; these will be announced later.

Submission:

Your submission consists of an executable path tracer (this may be an existing renderer) fitted with your SVGF implementation. Your executable may be for Windows, MacOS or Linux, or you may use a web-based renderer. Make sure to also submit a video of your product running on your machine.

Your submission should contain some way to turn the SVGF on/off. It can be via UI or keyboard. The important aspect is that we should be able to compare the path-tracer with and without your method. Think also about how to clearly show some important aspects, for example, with an FPS counter, memory usage indicator …

Please submit your work to studentcompetition@highperformancegraphics.org on or before Friday, May 23. Please include instructions on how to compile and run your code. You may use existing frameworks. Here are a few to get you started:

• Falcor Framework (contains the original implementation from the 2017 paper): https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/Falcor
• ShaderToy (limited SVGF implementation): https://www.shadertoy.com/view/msG3zG
• Christoph Peters’ Vulkan Path Tracer (does not contain SVGF): https://github.com/MomentsInGraphics/path_tracer
• Christoph Schied’s implementation of A-SVGF (a follow-up method): https://cg.ivd.kit.edu/atf.php

Winning:

The winning contribution will be selected by a jury of experts in the field. The three best submissions will be notified on Monday, May 26, so they can make travel arrangements to the conference.

Your submission will be published on the HPG’25 website unless you specifically ask us not to do so. On the website, we will use screenshots and/or a video of your work, plus anything else you wish to share. IP of all submitted materials remains with the author.

Contact:

Questions, problems, issues? Send a mail to: studentcompetition@highperformancegraphics.org or directly to the chairs:

• Ricardo Marroquim
• Jacco Bikker