Ray tracing on high performance computing hardware is a popular and active field of research. Our interactive ray tracing framework (http://www.cgv.tugraz.at/mrt) targets at modern massively parallel architectures and features different variants of ray tracing (Whitted-style, path tracing, ...) and applications. The modular system design is based on a wavefront tracing approach and ray loads wi...

We present a highly parallel, linearly scalable technique of kd-tree construction for ray tracing of dynamic geometry. We use conventional kd-tree compatible with the high performing algorithms such as MLRTA or frustum tracing. Proposed technique offers exceptional construction speed maintaining reasonable kd-tree quality for rendering stage. The algorithm builds a kd-tree from scratch each fra...

Realtime ray tracing produces high quality images at interactive frame rates. While the realtime rendering domain is still dominated by raster graphics, realtime ray tracing recently has become much more powerful. This paper addresses the essence of realtime ray tracing: the various acceleration techniques which yield interactive performance, how coherence between rays can be exploited and effe...

Ray tracing acceleration techniques most often consider only static scenes, neglecting the processing time needed to build the acceleration data structure. With the development of interactive ray tracing systems, this reconstruction time becomes a serious bottleneck if concerned with dynamic scenes. In this paper, we describe two strategies for efficient updating of bounding volume hierarchies ...

This paper examines the eeectiveness of load balancing strategies for ray tracing on large parallel computersystems and cluster computers. Popular static load balancing strategiesare shown to be inadequate for rendering complex images with contemporary ray tracing algorithms, and for rendering NTSC resolution images on 128 or more computers. Strategies based on image tiling are shown to be inee...

We present a dynamic ray tracing program for a spherically symmetric Earth that may be used to compute Fréchet kernels for traveltime and amplitude anomalies at finite frequency. The program works for arbitrarily defined phases and background models. The numerical precisions of kinematic and dynamic ray tracing are optimized to produce traveltime errors under 0.1 s, which is well below the data...

Ray tracing in spherical Luneburg lenses has always been represented in 2D. All propagation planes in a 3D spherical Luneburg lens generate the same ray tracing, due to its radial symmetry. A geometry without radial symmetry generates a different ray tracing. For this reason, a new ray tracing method in 3D through spherical and elliptical Luneburg lenses using 2D methods is proposed. The physic...

S U M M A R Y An approximate description of the zone of influence around the propagation path for a surface wave is provided by investigating the Fresnel zones for the frequency range of interest. The influence zone about surface wave paths, over which surface waves are coherent in phase, is identified as approximately one-third of the width of the first Fresnel zone. A technique called Fresnel...

The generation of natural and photorealistic images in computer graphics, normally make use of a well known method called ray tracing. Ray tracing is being adopted as a primary image rendering method in the research community for the last few years. With the advent of todays high speed processors, the method has received much attention over the last decade. Modern power of GPUs/CPUs and the acc...