Physically Accurate Rendering with Coherent Ray Tracing

As the processing power of modern CPUs increases, coherent ray tracing becomes more and more popular, as it allows significantly accelerating ray tracing using SIMD instructions. It turns out, however, that as ray tracing is accelerated, other parts of physically accurate rendering algorithms tend to become bottlenecks. In this paper, we introduce a coherent physically accurate rendering approach, which allows taking advantage of SIMD capabilities of modern CPUs at every stage of rendering computations. We demonstrate coherent algorithms for lighting and material computations as well as for antialiasing and tone mapping. The comparison performed on a number of test scenes demonstrates significant acceleration compared to common non-coherent approach.