Timothy J. Purcell
William R. Mark
ABSTRACT
Recently a breakthrough has occurred in graphics hardware: fixed function pipelines have been replaced with programmable vertex and fragment processors. In the near future, the graphics pipeline is likely to evolve into a general programmable stream processor capable of more than simply feed-forward triangle rendering.In this paper, we evaluate these trends in programmability of the graphics pipeline and explain how ray tracing can be mapped to graphics hardware. Using our simulator, we analyze the performance of a ray casting implementation on next generation programmable graphics hardware. In addition, we compare the performance difference between non-branching programmable hardware using a multipass implementation and an architecture that supports branching. We also show how this approach is applicable to other ray tracing algorithms such as Whitted ray tracing, path tracing, and hybrid rendering algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate that ray tracing on graphics hardware could prove to be faster than CPU based implementations as well as competitive with traditional hardware accelerated feed-forward triangle rendering.
- 3DLabs, 2001. OpenGL 2.0 whitepapers web site. http://www.3dlabs.com/support/developer/ogl2/index.htm.Google Scholar
- Alverson, R., Callahan, D., Cummings, D., Koblenz, B., Porterfield, A., and Smith, B. 1990. The Tera computer system. In Proceedings of the 1990 International Conference on Supercomputing, 1--6. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Amanatides, J., and Woo, A. 1987. A fast voxel traversal algorithm for ray tracing. In Eurographics '87, 3--10.Google Scholar
- Anderson, B., Stewart, A., MacAulay, R., and Whitted, T. 1997. Accommodating memory latency in a low-cost rasterizer. In 1997 SIGGRAPH/ Eurographics Workshop on Graphics hardware, 97--102. Google ScholarDigital Library
- ATI, 2001. RADEON 8500 product web site. http://www.ati.com/products/pc/radeon8500128/index.html.Google Scholar
- Carr, N. A., Hall, J. D., and Hart, J. C. 2002. The ray engine. Tech. Rep. UIUCDCS-R-2002-2269, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois.Google Scholar
- Delany, H. C. 1988. Ray tracing on a connection machine. In Proceedings of the 1988 International Conference on Supercomputing, 659--667. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fajardo, M. 2001. Monte carlo ray tracing in action. In State of the Art in Monte Carlo Ray Tracing for Realistic Image Synthesis - SIGGRAPH 2001 Course 29. 151--162.Google Scholar
- Fujimoto, A., Tanaka, T., and Iwata, K. 1986. ARTS: Accelerated ray tracing system. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 6, 4, 16--26. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hall, D., 2001. The AR350: Today's ray trace rendering processor. 2001 SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Workshop On Graphics Hardware - Hot 3D Session 1. http://graphicshardware.org/previous/www_2001/presentations/ Hot3D_Daniel_Hall.pdf.Google Scholar
- Havran, V., Prikryl, J., and Purgathofer, W. 2000. Statistical comparison of ray-shooting efficiency schemes. Tech. Rep. TR-186-2-00-14, Institute of Computer Graphics, Vienna University of Technology.Google Scholar
- Igehy, H., Eldridge, M., and Proudfoot, K. 1998. Prefetching in a texture cache architecture. In 1998 SIGGRAPH/ Eurographics Workshop on Graphics hardware, 133-ff. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kajiya, J. T. 1986. The rendering equation. In Computer Graphics (Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 86), 143--150. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Khailany, B., Dally, W. J., Rixner, S., Kapasi, U. J., Mattson, P., Namkoong, J., Owens, J. D., and Towles, B. 2000. IMAGINE: Signal and image processing using streams. In Hot Chips 12. IEEE Computer Society Press.Google Scholar
- Kirk, D., 2001. GeForce3 architecture overview. http://developer.nvidia.com/docs/IO/1271/ATT/GF3ArchitectureOverview.ppt.Google Scholar
- Lindholm, E., Kilgard, M. J., and Moreton, H: 2001. A user-programmable vertex engine. In Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2001, 149--158. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mark, W. R., and Proudfoot, K. 2001. The F-buffer: A rasterization-order FIFO buffer for multi-pass rendering. In 2001 SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Marshall, B., 2001. DirectX graphics future. Meltdown 2001 Conference. http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/corpevents/meltdown2001/ppt/DXG9.ppt.Google Scholar
- Microsoft, 2001. DirectX product web site, http://www.microsoft.com/directx/.Google Scholar
- Molnar, S., Eyles, J., and Poulton, J. 1992. PixelFlow: High-speed rendering using image composition. In Computer Graphics (Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 92), 231--240. Google ScholarDigital Library
- NVIDIA, 2001. GeForce3 Ti Family: Product overview. 10.01v1. http://www.nvidia.com/docs/lo/1050/SUPP/gf3ti_overview.pdf.Google Scholar
- Parker, S., Shirley, P., Livnat, Y., Hansen, C., and Sloan, P.-P. 1998. Interactive ray tracing for isosurface rendering. In IEEE Visualization '98, 233--238. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Parker, S., Martin, W., Sloan, P.-P. J., Shirley, P., Smits, B., and Hansen, C. 1999. Interactive ray tracing. In 1999 ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, 119--126. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Peercy, M. S., Olano, M., Airey, J., and Ungar, P. J. 2000. Interactive multi-pass programmable shading. In Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2000, 425--432. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Reinhard, E., Smits, B., and Hansen, C. 2000. Dynamic acceleration structures for interactive ray tracing. In Rendering Techniques 2000: 11th Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, 299--306. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Spitzer, J., 2001. Texture compositing with register combiners. http://developer.nvidia.com/docs/IO/1382/ATT/RegisterCombiners.pdf.Google Scholar
- Torborg, J., and Kajiya, J. T. 1996. Talisman: Commodity realtime 3D graphics for the PC. In Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 96, 353--363. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wald, I., Slusallek, P., and Benthin, C. 2001. Interactive distributed ray tracing of highly complex models. In Rendering Techniques 2001: 12th Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, 277--288. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wald, I., Slusallek, P., Benthin, C., and Wagner, M. 2001. Interactive rendering with coherent ray tracing. Computer Graphics Forum 20, 3, 153--164.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Whitted, T. 1980. An improved illumination model for shaded display. Communications of the ACM 23, 6, 343--349. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Ray tracing on programmable graphics hardware
Recommendations
Ray tracing on programmable graphics hardware
Recently a breakthrough has occurred in graphics hardware: fixed function pipelines have been replaced with programmable vertex and fragment processors. In the near future, the graphics pipeline is likely to evolve into a general programmable stream ...
Ray tracing on programmable graphics hardware
SIGGRAPH '02: Proceedings of the 29th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniquesRecently a breakthrough has occurred in graphics hardware: fixed function pipelines have been replaced with programmable vertex and fragment processors. In the near future, the graphics pipeline is likely to evolve into a general programmable stream ...
Use of hardware Z-buffered rasterization to accelerate ray tracing
SAC '07: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM symposium on Applied computingRay tracing is a rendering technique for producing realistic 3D computer graphics. Compared to traditional scan-line rendering which is generally adopted by graphics pipeline, ray tracing can simulate more realistic global illumination, however, with ...
Comments