Realtime Ray Tracing on GPUS: NVIRT by NVIDIA and RayGLSL by LFK

Currently everyone is speaking about ray tracing. In 1968 rst steps in the elds of Ray Tracing were made. Since then, this topic keeps appearing in the media continuously. However, until now there are only applications in the high quality o ine area. In the real-time sector it has been kept in check consequently by the rasterization algorithm, which current graphics cards are designed for. But with increasing content in such applications, there's a call for a more exible illumination model showing up. But until now there have not been any adequate candidates in the hardware area, as well as on the software area. But since Intel has started its search for a new killer app for its upcoming graphics platform Larabee, the words real-time and ray tracing have been connected an increasing number of times. Within their search they came up with the idea to avoid current GPU limitations by a more general streaming pipeline, by using their x86 architecture for a stream processor. But it is not the intention of Intel[18], NVIDIA[26] or other graphics companies, like it is often stated in the last months, that ray tracing will be the replacement of rasterization. For that the speed advantage of rasterization is just too big. However, by the use of hybrid approaches, some computationally intensive e ects could be bound into the content pipeline a lot simpler and some others would even been just made possible by that. Current real-time e ects, which could pro t of this, would be (soft-) shadow algorithms or real-time global illumination algorithms that use ray-tracing-based photon mapping to determine the indirect light radiation. Within this semester thesis for the advanced seminar, the two topics of new ray tracing APIs and optimization of an existing GPU Ray Tracer, called RayGLSL will be focused. Furthermore, two more responses to Intels plans have arrived on the market. NVIDIAs NVIRT API[29] for NVIDIA graphics cards, based on the GPGPU tool cuda[28], and also a hardware solution for ray tracing by the company Caustic Graphics. Both systems claim to be able to display interactive real-time ray tracing results. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasterization General Purpose Computation on GPUs