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体素阵列广泛应用于为渲染场景的表面和体积添加丰富细节，而经过滤波的纹理查询是生成高质量图像的关键。我们证明，在光照计算之后而非当前常规做法（即在BSDF评估之前）进行纹理滤波，能够为渲染方程提供更精确的解。这些优势不仅是理论性的，在常见情况下也显而易见。我们进一步说明，对纹理滤波器进行随机采样是启用该方法的关键——此前除有限情况外均无法实现。随机纹理滤波还具有额外优势，包括高效实现高质量纹理滤波器，以及高效处理存储在压缩和稀疏数据结构（包括神经表示）中的纹理。我们在实时渲染和离线渲染中展示了应用效果，并表明额外引入的随机误差极微。此外，该误差可通过时空去噪或适中的像素采样率得到良好处理。