The ray engine

Abstract

Assisted by recent advances in programmable graphics hardware, fast rasterization-based techniques have made significant progress in photorealistic rendering, but still only render a subset of the effects possible with ray tracing. We are closing this gap with the implementation of ray-triangle intersection as a pixel shader on existing hardware. This GPU ray-intersection implementation reconfigures the geometry engine into a ray engine that efficiently intersects caches of rays for a wide variety of host-based rendering tasks, including ray tracing, path tracing, form factor computation, photon mapping, subsurface scattering and general visibility processing.