Efficient GPU Screen-Space Ray Tracing

Abstract

We present an efficient GPU solution for screen-space 3D ray tracing against a depth buffer by adapting the perspective-correct DDA line rasterization algorithm. Compared to linear ray marching, this ensures sampling at a contiguous set of pixels and no oversampling. This paper provides for the first time full implementation details of a method that has been proven in production of recent major game titles. After explaining the optimizations, we then extend the method to support multiple depth layers for robustness. We include GLSL code and examples of pixel-shader ray tracing for several applications.