2D texture maps and 3D voxel arrays are widely used to add rich detail to the surfaces and volumes of rendered scenes, and filtered texture lookups are integral to producing high-quality imagery. We show that filtering textures after evaluating lighting, rather than before BSDF evaluation as is current practice, gives a more accurate solution to the rendering equation. These benefits are not merely theoretical, but are apparent in common cases. We further show that stochastically sampling texture filters is crucial for enabling this approach, which has not been possible previously except in limited cases. Stochastic texture filtering offers additional benefits, including efficient implementation of high-quality texture filters and efficient filtering of textures stored in compressed and sparse data structures, including neural representations. We demonstrate applications in both real-time and offline rendering and show that the additional stochastic error is minimal. Furthermore, this error is handled well by either spatiotemporal denoising or moderate pixel sampling rates.

翻译：2D纹理贴图和3D体素阵列被广泛用于为渲染场景的表面和体积增添丰富细节，而经过滤波的纹理查询是生成高质量图像的核心环节。我们证明，在光照计算之后进行纹理滤波（而非现有做法中在BSDF评估之前滤波）能够为渲染方程提供更精确的解。该优势并非仅存于理论层面，在常见场景中亦显而易见。我们进一步表明，随机采样纹理滤波器对这一方法的实现至关重要，此前除有限情况外均无法实现。随机纹理滤波还具备额外优势，包括高效实现高质量纹理滤波器，以及对压缩和稀疏数据结构（含神经表征）中存储的纹理进行高效滤波。我们在实时渲染和离线渲染场景中展示了其应用，并验证了随机误差极小。此外，此类误差可通过时空去噪或适中的像素采样率得到良好处理。