Realtime Ray Tracing

Realtime ray tracing produces high quality images at interactive frame rates. While the realtime rendering domain is still dominated by raster graphics, realtime ray tracing recently has become much more powerful. This paper addresses the essence of realtime ray tracing: the various acceleration techniques which yield interactive performance, how coherence between rays can be exploited and effective parallelization. In addition to that, a comprehensive comparison of realtime ray tracing versus modern raster graphics hardware is given. Compared to raster graphics, ray tracing allows highly realistic image synthesis and most importantly, it scales well for massively complex scenes. Considering those advantages and the fact that realtime ray tracing software performance on PCs has finally surpassed the performance of dedicated rasterization hardware for highly complex models, all indications are that ray tracing may replace rasterization based realtime rendering for scientific visualization and games in the near future. CR Categories: I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Ray Tracing—ThreeDimensional Graphics and Realism;