SLANG.D: Fast, Modular and Differentiable Shader Programming

doi:10.1145/3618353

SLANG.D: Fast, Modular and Differentiable Shader Programming

2023-12-05

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Sai Praveen Bangaru *

Jonathan Ragan‐Kelley

DOI：10.1145/3618353

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Abstract

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We introduce SLANG.D, an extension to the Slang shading language that incorporates first-class automatic differentiation support. The new shading language allows us to transform a Direct3D-based path tracer to be fully differentiable with minor modifications to existing code. SLANG.D enables a shared ecosystem between machine learning frameworks and pre-existing graphics hardware API-based rendering systems, promoting the interchange of components and ideas across these two domains. Our contributions include a differentiable type system designed to ensure type safety and semantic clarity in codebases that blend differentiable and non-differentiable code, language primitives that automatically generate both forward and reverse gradient propagation methods, and a compiler architecture that generates efficient derivative propagation shader code for graphics pipelines. Our compiler supports differentiating code that involves arbitrary control-flow, dynamic dispatch, generics and higher-order differentiation, while providing developers flexible control of checkpointing and gradient aggregation strategies for best performance. Our system allows us to differentiate an existing real-time path tracer, Falcor, with minimal change to its shader code. We show that the compiler-generated derivative kernels perform as efficiently as handwritten ones. In several benchmarks, the SLANG.D code achieves significant speedup when compared to prior automatic differentiation systems.

Keywords:

Automatic differentiation

differentiable graphics

differentiable rendering

shading language

SLANG.D: Fast, Modular and Differentiable Shader Programming

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