Abstract:

Ever since its introduction in 1980 the ray tracing algorithm has been a tricky puzzle. On the one hand it offers photo-realistic rendering superior to the more common rasterization algorithm, but on the other it’s much too slow to serve as a replacement. Much of rasterization’s performance advantage lies in the use of special purpose hardward. This hardware, known as graphics cards, has evolved rapidly over the past decades, driven by demands for ever higher polygon counts. more recently, these pressure has lead to the introduction of programmable shader units to the graphics card architecture. These units became ever more programmable as researchers realized their potential as general parallel processing units. Eventually this trend lead to the exploration of the graphics card architecture as a ray tracing platform.