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Abstract:
Rendering methods based on ray tracing provide high image realism, but have
been historically regarded as offline only. This has changed in the past
decade, due to significant advances in the construction and traversal
performance of acceleration structures and the efficient use of data-parallel
processing. Today, all major graphics companies offer real-time ray tracing
solutions. The following work has contributed to this development with some key
insights.
We first address the limited support of dynamic scenes in previous work, by
proposing two new parallel-friendly construction algorithms for KD-trees and
BVHs. By approximating the cost function, we accelerate construction by up to
an order of magnitude (especially for BVHs), at the expense of only tiny
degradation to traversal performance.
For the static portions of the scene, we also address the topic of creating the
"perfect" acceleration structure. We develop a polynomial time non-greedy BVH
construction algorithm. We then modify it to produce a new type of acceleration
structure that inherits both the high performance of KD-trees and the small
size of
BVHs.
Finally, we focus on bringing real-time ray tracing to commodity desktop
computers.
We develop several new KD-tree and BVH traversal algorithms specically
tailored for the GPU. With them, we show for the first time that GPU ray tracing
is indeed feasible, and it can outperform CPU ray tracing by almost an order of
magnitude, even on large CAD models.
