Design of a Pipelined Architecture for Ray/Bézier Patch Intersection Computation

Ray tracing is one of the most important techniques in computer graphics for rendering high quality and photorealistic pictures. In it, at least one ray is cast into the scene for each pixel of the image. If the ray hits an object, it may produce other rays, such as reflection, shadow, and refraction rays to determine the color of the associated pixel (see [1] for more details). Ray tracing deals with thousands, if not millions, of such ray-object intersection calculations in each image and is thus well known for its exorbitant computation time.