One of the most sought-for goals in computer graphics is to generate “realism in real time”, i.e. the generation of realistically looking images at realtime frame rates. Today, virtually all approaches towards realtime rendering use graphics hardware, which is based almost exclusively on triangle rasterization. Unfortunately, though this technology has seen tremendous progress over the last few...

Ray tracing on GPUs is becoming quite common these days. There are many publicly available documents on how to implement basic ray tracing on GPUs for spheres and implicit surfaces. We even have some general frameworks for ray tracing on GPUs. We however hardly find details on how to implement more complex ray tracing algorithms themselves that are commonly used for photorealistic rendering. Th...

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 th...