Hello folks,

I ve been sharing here early progress of my Metal Path Tracer project. The project has evolved considerably, both architecturally and technically.

Today I’m releasing v3.0.0 to the public.

The renderer targets Apple Silicon/macOS and has gradually grown into a larger experimental rendering architecture focused on physically based rendering, validation workflows, and GPU rendering research on Metal.

Current features include:

• Metal HWRT + SWRT backends
• Megakernel + wavefront rendering paths
• ReSTIR DI / ReGIR experiments
• OIDN denoising
• glTF 2.0 support
• HDR environment lighting + importance sampling
• Embree backend for validation/parity testing
• Headless EXR validation workflows
• Progressive viewport renderer with ImGui tooling
• Large scenes like Sponza, San Miguel, and Bistro

A major focus of the project has been exploring architectural tradeoffs on Apple GPUs:

• Wavefront vs megakernel rendering
• HWRT vs software traversal parity
• ReSTIR integration in Metal
• Memory residency for large scenes
• Reproducible validation against Embree

I’ll continue sharing development logs, renderer architecture notes, technical breakdowns, experiments, and future rendering research here on the devlog.

Long-term development continues through research, experimentation, documentation, and renderer development.

Many thanks.

GitHub:
https://github.com/dariopagliaricci/Metal-PathTracer-arm64