A shader-based ray tracing engine

Abstract

Recently, ray tracing techniques have been highly adopted to produce high quality images and animations. In this paper, we present our design and implementation of a real-time ray-traced rendering engine. We achieved real-time capability for triangle primitives, based on the ray tracing techniques on GPGPU (general-purpose graphics processing unit) compute shaders. To accelerate the ray tracing engine, we used a set of acceleration techniques, including bounding volume hierarchy, its roped representation, joint up-sampling, and bilateral filtering. Our current implementation shows remarkable speed-ups, with acceptable error values. Experimental results shows 2.5–13.6 times acceleration, and less than 3% error values for the 95% confidence range. Our next step will be enhancing bilateral filter behaviors.