Interactive Ray Tracing on Commodity PC Clusters

Abstract

Due to its practical significance and its high degree of parallelism, ray tracing has always been an attractive target for research in parallel processing. With recent advances in both hardware and software, it is now possible to create high quality images at interactive rates on commodity PC clusters.In this paper, we will outline the ``state of the art'' of interactive distributed ray tracing based on a description of the distributed aspects of the OpenRT interactive ray tracing engine. We will then demonstrate its scalability and practical applicability based on several example applications.