Realtime Ray Tracing and Interactive Global Illumination - Scientific ...

Contents
I Interactive Ray Tracing 1
1 Introduction 3
1.1 Outline of This Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2 An Introduction to Ray Tracing 7
2.1 The Core Concept – Ray Shooting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.2 The Ray Tracing Rendering Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.3 General Ray Tracing based Algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3 A Brief Survey of Ray Tracing Acceleration Methods 19
3.1 Computing less Samples in the Image Plane . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.2 Reducing the Number of Secondary Rays . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
3.3 Accelerating Ray-Scene Intersection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
4 Interactive Ray Tracing 37
4.1 Why Interactive Ray Tracing ? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
4.2 Why not earlier, and why today ? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
5 Towards Realtime Ray Tracing 45
5.1 Realtime Ray Tracing in Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
5.2 Ray Tracing on Programmable GPUs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
5.3 The SaarCOR Realtime Ray Tracing Engine . . . . . . . . . . 55
5.4 Towards Realtime Ray Tracing – Conclusions . . . . . . . . . 63
II The RTRT/OpenRT Realtime Ray Tracer 65
6 General Design Issues 67
6.1 General Design Decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
6.2 Efficiency and Optimization Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
6.3 Efficient use of SIMD Extensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77