Augenblick: A user-friendly and extensible realtime ray tracing architecture

Abstract

Ray tracing is the method of choice, when it comes to high quality image synthesis. Just recently, ray tracing has become fast enough to render non-trivial scenes at interactive or even realtime frame rates. However, often such a high performance comes at a cost, which in most cases is bad readability, low portability and inflexibility of the code base. In this paper we present a ray tracing engine based on a novel architecture which avoids all of these drawbacks, but still maintains a high level of execution speed. Furthermore, the system is targeted to support modern hardware architectures, thus offering native support for SIMD execution units and multithreading out of the box. Augenblick, the ray tracing engine presented in this paper, strives to offer all of its features at a very convenient level to developers. The greatest advantage of Augenblick, however, may be its flexibility which enables the developer to use the system as it is or extend it to own specific needs easily with little effort and very few or no constraints.