Abstract
Ray tracing still is the workhorse in optical design and simula- tion. Its basic principle, propagating light as a set of mutually independent rays, implies a linear dependency of the computational effort and the num- ber of rays involved in the problem. At the same time, the mutual independ- ence of the light rays bears a huge potential for parallelization of the computational load. This potential has recently been recognized in the visualization community, where graphics processing unit (GPU)-acceler- ated ray tracing is used to render photorealistic images. However, preci- sion requirements in optical simulation are substantially higher than in visualization, and therefore performance results known from visualization cannot be expected to transfer to optical simulation one-to-one. In this contribution, we present an open-source implementation of a GPU-accel- erated ray tracer, based on nVidias acceleration engine OptiX, that traces in double precision and exploits the massively parallel architecture of modern graphics cards. We compare its performance to a CPU-based tracer that has been developed in parallel. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI. (DOI: 10.1117/1.OE.52.5.053004) Subject terms: ray tracing; graphics processing unit-accelerated computing; optical simulation.
Highlights
Ray tracing has been the most important tool to optical designers ever since Ernst Abbe and Carl Zeiss started to systematically design optical microscopes
We present an open-source implementation of a graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated ray tracer, based on nVidias acceleration engine OptiX, that traces in double precision and exploits the massively parallel architecture of modern graphics cards
It is presumably thanks to the marketing prospects in this area that nVidia introduced a ray-tracing application acceleration engine called OptiX9 at SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans. It provides an intuitive C-style access to the parallel computing architecture of nVidia’s latest graphics cards, which is designed to enable quick development of ray-tracing applications. It is the intent of this contribution to present an openly accessible, GPU-accelerated ray-tracing software based on OptiX that is dedicated to optical simulation and design, and to compare its performance to central processing unit (CPU) ray tracing
Summary
Ray tracing has been the most important tool to optical designers ever since Ernst Abbe and Carl Zeiss started to systematically design optical microscopes. Stray light analysis of complex optical systems as well as design and evaluation of illumination systems rely on Monte Carlo techniques, whose signal-to-noise ratio is inversely proportional to the square root of the number of rays reaching the detector These applications are still limited by computation speed, even on today’s machines.[4] innovative applications of ray tracing in current research topics often use a huge number of rays Ray tracing attracted a lot of attention in the visualization community, where it is used to render photorealistic images for video games and special effects in movies It was mainly this community that realized the prospects of massively parallel computing architectures of modern graphics processing units (GPU) for accelerating ray tracing.[8] It is presumably thanks to the marketing prospects in this area that nVidia introduced a ray-tracing application acceleration engine called OptiX9 at SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans. It is the intent of this contribution to present an openly accessible, GPU-accelerated ray-tracing software based on OptiX that is dedicated to optical simulation and design, and to compare its performance to CPU ray tracing
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