Imaging pipeline improvements in Indigo 3.0.14

The imaging pipeline collectively refers to the sequence of processing steps which result in the final displayed image. This consists of tone mapping, white point correction, light layer processing and the image resizing from the super-sampled source data.

Previously this would require a number of auxiliary buffers, which could use quite a lot of memory since they needed to be at the same resolution as the final and super-sampled images. However, since Indigo version 3.0.14, we've implemented a new imaging pipeline which avoids the need for these extra buffers, and is also a little faster.

When rendering high resolution images, especially ones with high super-sampling, this can save gigabytes of memory! Here are some numbers reported in our Indigo 3.0.14 announcement:

Scene by dcm (3508x2480 resolution, super-sampling factor 4):
Indigo 3.0.12: 12,1 GB used
Indigo 3.0.14: 8,7 GB used - 3.4 gigabytes saved!

Scene by Zom-B (3543x1993 resolution, super-sampling factor 3):
Indigo 3.0.12: 3.8 GB used
Indigo 3.0.14: 2.2 GB used - 1.6 gigabytes saved!

These improvements are only enabled when not using Aperture Diffraction, however work to improve the memory usage and performance of AD is ongoing!