Real-Time Ray Tracing with CUDA

The graphics processors (GPUs) have recently emerged as a low-cost alternative for parallel programming. Since modern GPUs have great computational power as well as high memory bandwidth, running ray tracing on them has been an active field of research in computer graphics in recent years. Furthermore, the introduction of CUDA, a novel GPGPU architecture, has removed several limitations that the traditional GPU-based ray tracing suffered. In this paper, an implementation of high performance CUDA ray tracing is demonstrated. We focus on the performance and show how our design choices in various optimization lead to an implementation that outperforms the previous works. For reasonably complex scenes with simple shading, our implementation achieves the performance of 30 to 43 million traced rays per second. Our implementation also includes the effects of recursive specular reflection and refraction, which were less discussed in previous GPU-based ray tracing works.