Accelerated ray tracing using programmable graphics pipelines

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2008
Es, Ş. Alphan
The graphics hardware have evolved from simple feed forward triangle rasterization devices to flexible, programmable, and powerful parallel processors. This evolution allows the researchers to use graphics processing units (GPU) for both general purpose computations and advanced graphics rendering. Sophisticated GPUs hold great opportunities for the acceleration of computationally expensive photorealistic rendering methods. Rendering of photorealistic images in real-time is a challenge. In this work, we investigate efficient ways to utilize GPUs for real-time photorealistic rendering. Specifically, we studied uniform grid based ray tracing acceleration methods and GPU friendly traversal algorithms. We show that our method is faster than or competitive to other GPU based ray tracing acceleration techniques. The proposed approach is also applicable to the fast rendering of volumetric data. Additionally, we devised GPU based solutions for real-time stereoscopic image generation which can be used in companion with GPU based ray tracers.

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Citation Formats
Ş. A. Es, “Accelerated ray tracing using programmable graphics pipelines,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2008.