A hybrid GPU rasterized and ray traced rendering pipeline for real time rendering of per pixel effects

Abstract

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 present parallelization methods for the classical ray tracing algorithm, in order to achieve interactive, or even real time ray tracing rendering, we present a rasterized and ray traced hybrid technique, completely done in GPU. While a deferred render model determines the colors of primary rays, a ray tracing phase compute other effects such as specular reflection and transparency, in order to achieve effects that are not easily obtained with rasterization. We also present a heuristic approach that select a subset of relevant objects to be ray traced, avoiding traversing rays for objects that might not have a significant contribution to the real time experience. This selection is capable of maintaining the real time requirement of games, while offering superior visual effects. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.