Efficiency issues on Ray Tracing Machine

Recently computer world was amazed by the explosive growth of the hardware efficiency. Average computer now has integrated hardware ability of displaying thousands triangles per second. Hi-end graphical accelerators (e.g. Sony Playstation 2) render up to 20 million triangles per second. However, importance of old good ray tracing, as the most accurate method for realistic image synthesis became not lower than, say, ten years ago. Here we consider two commonly used ray -tracing methods: regular grid and octogrid traversing. Ray-tracing speed, memory requirements and preprocessing speed are compared.