Bounding volume hierarchies, which are commonly used to speed up ray tracing, are heavily accessed during ray traversal. Reducing the memory footprint for the bounding volume hierarchies leads to a better cache hit ratio and, therefore, faster ray tracing. This paper examines an approach of using 16-bit halfprecision floating-point numbers to store bounding volume hierarchy inner nodes. Compare...

Classical ray-tracing algorithms compute radiance returning to the eye along one or more sample rays through each pixel of an image. The output of a ray-tracing algorithm, although potentially photorealistic, is a two-dimensional quantity { an image array of radiance values { and is not directly useful from any viewpoint other than the one for which it was computed. This paper makes several con...

We investigate in this paper the problem of discrete ray-tracing. The incorrect intersection phenomena are shown. The need of a specific discretization is discussed according to these problems. We propose a restricted use of a semi-discrete ray-tracer which avoid some problems that arose with discrete ray-tracing.

Rendering in 3D games typically uses rasterization approaches in order to guarantee interactive frame rates, since ray tracing, a superior method for rendering photorealistic images, has greater computational cost. With the advent of massively parallel processors in the form of GPUs, parallelized ray tracing have been investigated as an alternative to rasterization techniques. While many works ...

A simple extension to ray tracing is presented that creates visually plausible “soft” shadows with little extra computation. Although these soft shadows are approximate, they are robust and have penumbra widths that behave in a believable way, including accurate placement of singularities where penumbra width is zero. The method has continuous behavior in space and time, so it is appropriate fo...

Throughout the history of computer graphics, a very active area of research has been the attempt to create convincing, life-like images. Ray tracing is a technique for generating photorealistic images, and can easily support a wide range of natural phenomenon. However, producing a ray traced image is very expensive; and producing a ray traced animation is often prohibitively expensive. This the...

Ray-tracing algorithms can be used to render a virtual scene and to detect collisions between objects. Numerous ray-tracing algorithms have been proposed which use data structures optimized for specific cases (rigid objects, deformable objects, etc.). Some solutions try to optimize performance by combining several algorithms to use the most efficient algorithm for each ray. This paper presents ...

Classical ray-tracing algorithms compute radiance returning to the eye along one or more sample rays through each pixel of an image. The output of a ray-tracing algorithm, although potentially photoreal-istic, is a two-dimensional quantity { an image array of radiance values { and is not directly useful from any viewpoint other than the one for which it was computed. This paper makes several co...

PURPOSE To use ray tracing to determine the influence of corneal aberrations on the prediction of the optimum intraocular lens (IOL) power for implantation in normal eyes and eyes with previous laser in situ keratomileusis (LASIK). SETTING Hospital Universitario Virgen de la Arrixaca, Murcia, Spain. DESIGN Case series. METHODS The optimum IOL power was calculated by ray tracing using a pa...