Mediocre game technology

After finishing my framework overhaul I'm now back on hybrid rendering and screen space raytracing. My first plan was to just port the old renderer to the new framework but I ended up rewriting all of it instead, finally trying out a few things that has been on my mind for a while. I've been wanting to try stratified sampling for a long time as a way to reduce noise in the diffuse light. The idea is to sample the hemisphere within a certain set of fixed strata instead of completely random to give a more uniform distribution. The direction within each stratum is still random, so it would still cover the whole hemisphere and converge to the same result, just in a slightly more predictable way. I won't go into more detail, but full explanation is all over the Internet, for instance here . Let's look at the difference between stratified and uniform sampling. To make a fair comparison there is no lighting in these images, just ambient occlusion and an emissive object.