A Shader-Based Ray Tracing Engine

Sukjun Park,Nakhoon Baek

doi:10.3390/app11073264

Abstract

Recently, ray tracing techniques have been highly adopted to produce high quality images and animations. In this paper, we present our design and implementation of a real-time ray-traced rendering engine. We achieved real-time capability for triangle primitives, based on the ray tracing techniques on GPGPU (general-purpose graphics processing unit) compute shaders. To accelerate the ray tracing engine, we used a set of acceleration techniques, including bounding volume hierarchy, its roped representation, joint up-sampling, and bilateral filtering. Our current implementation shows remarkable speed-ups, with acceptable error values. Experimental results shows 2.5–13.6 times acceleration, and less than 3% error values for the 95% confidence range. Our next step will be enhancing bilateral filter behaviors.

Highlights

The usefulness of computer graphics in various fields has long been emphasized since its origin [1,2]
With the need for the immediate visualization, graphics processors were demanded to be specialized in the traditional rasterization technique, consuming conspicuously lower resources than the ray tracing in the cost of low precision [7,8]
We introduce the real-time implementation of a triangle primitive, based the ray tracing method on the top of the GPGPU compute shader, along with optimization and light approximation techniques

Summary

Introduction

The usefulness of computer graphics in various fields has long been emphasized since its origin [1,2]. This method traces millions of rays (or optical paths), which are intersecting, scattering, and reflecting on object surfaces, with a huge amount of computations [3,4]. With the need for the immediate visualization, graphics processors were demanded to be specialized in the traditional rasterization technique, consuming conspicuously lower resources than the ray tracing in the cost of low precision [7,8]

Methods

Results

Conclusion