A straightforward CUDA implementation for interactive ray-tracing

• Published in: 2008 Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing p. 178
• Main Authors: Budge, B.C., Anderson, J.C., Garth, C., Joy, K.I.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.08.2008
• Subjects: Computer architecture; Data structures; Graphics; Hardware; I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]: Graphics data structures and data types-Methodology and Techniques Realism; I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism-Raytracing; Kernel; Ray tracing; USA Councils
• ISBN: 9781424427413; 142442741X
• DOI: 10.1109/RT.2008.4634641

In recent years, applying the powerful computational resources delivered by modern GPUs to ray tracing has resulted in a number of ray tracing implementations that allow rendering of moderately sized scenes at interactive speeds. In our poster, we present a fast implementation for ray tracing with CUDA. We describe an optimized GPU-based ray tracing approach within the CUDA framework that does not explicitly make use of ray coherency or architectural specifics and is therefore simple to implement, while still exceeding performance of previously presented approaches. Optimal performance is achieved by empirically tuning the ray tracing kernel to the executing hardware. We describe our implementation in detail and provide a performance analysis and comparison to prior work.