Hardware Ray Tracing using Fixed Point Arithmetic

For realistic image synthesis and many other simulation applications, ray tracing is the only choice to achieve the desired realism and accuracy. Ray tracing has become such an important algorithm that an implementation in hardware is justified and desirable. The first ray tracing hardware realizations have been using floating point and logarithmic arithmetic. While floating point arithmetic requires considerably more logic than integer arithmetic, an implementation in logarithmic arithmetic is much simpler, but still suffers from similar problems. In analogy to rasterization hardware we therefore investigate the use of fixed point arithmetic for ray tracing. Our software implementation and comparisons provide strong evidence that an implementation of ray tracing in hardware using fixed point arithmetic is an efficient and robust choice.