HYBRID RAY TRACING - Ray Tracing Using GPU-Accelerated Image-Space Methods

Philippe C. D. Robert, Severin Schoepke, Hanspeter Bieri

2007

Abstract

In recent years, interactive ray tracing has become a reality, although mainly by using clustered workstations and sophisticated acceleration structures. On non-clustered computer architectures this is still not an easy task, especially when rendering animated scenes, even though the computation power of modern workstations is increasing rapidly. In this paper we propose known image-space rendering techniques to be used for accelerating ray tracing. Firstly, we describe a GPU-based visibility preprocessing algorithm to perform interactive ray casting by applying the standard depth testing capability of graphics processing units. This method – called object intersection buffer (OIB) – is particularly suitable for ray casting animated scenes, as it completely avoids the necessity of creating and updating any kind of spatial acceleration structures in order to achieve high frame rates. Then we integrate shadow rendering into our ray caster using the shadow mapping technique to avoid computationally expensive shadow rays. Then, we convert our GPU-based ray caster into a hybrid ray tracer by computing reflection and refraction rays on the CPU using a spatial acceleration structure. This allows us to exploit parallel rendering to increase the overall frame rate. Finally, we compare our implementations to each other and analyse their advantages and disadvantages in terms of visual quality and rendering performance.

References

  1. Bolz, J., Farmer, I., Grinspun, E., and Schröder, P. (2003). The GPU as Numerical Simulation Engine. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2003. ACM Press.
  2. Buck, I., Foley, T., Horn, D., Sugerman, J., Fatahalian, K., Houston, M., and Hanrahan, P. (2004). Brook for GPUs: stream computing on graphics hardware. ACM Trans. Graph., 23(3):777-786.
  3. Carr, N. A., Hall, J. D., and Hart, J. C. (2002). The Ray Engine. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS conference on Graphics hardware, pages 37-46. Eurographics Association.
  4. Carr, N. A., Hoberock, J., Crane, K., and Hart, J. C. (2006). Fast GPU Ray Tracing of Dynamic Meshes using Geometry Images. In GI 7806: Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Graphics interface, pages 203-209.
  5. Christen, M. (2005). Ray Tracing on GPU. Master's thesis, University of Applied Sciences Basel.
  6. Fatahalian, K., Sugerman, J., and Hanrahan, P. (2004). Understanding the Efficiency of GPU Algorithms for Matrix-Matrix Multiplication. In Graphics Hardware 2004, pages 133-137.
  7. Foley, T. and Sugerman, J. (2005). Kd-Tree Acceleration Structures for a GPU Raytracer. In HWWS 7805: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS conference on Graphics hardware, pages 15-22, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press.
  8. Heckbert, P. (1986). Survey of texture mapping. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl., 6(11):56-67.
  9. Karlsson, F. and Ljungstedt, C. J. (2004). Ray Tracing Fully Implemented on Programmable Graphics Hardware. Master's thesis, Chalmers University of Technology.
  10. Kim, S., ye Kim, S., and hyun Yoon, K. (2000). A Study on the Ray-Tracing Acceleration Technique Based on the ZF-Buffer Algorithm. In IV 7800: Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Visualisation, page 393, Washington, DC, USA. IEEE Computer Society.
  11. Lamparter, B., Müller, H., and Winckler, J. (1990). The Ray-z-Buffer-An Approach for Ray Tracing Arbitrarily Large Scenes. Technical Report report00021.
  12. Lefohn, A., Kniss, J. M., Strzodka, R., Sengupta, S., and Owens, J. D. (2006). Glift: Generic, Efficient, Random-Access GPU Data Structures. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 25(1):60-99.
  13. Lext, J., Assarsson, U., and M öller, T. (2000). BART: A Benchmark for Animated Ray Tracing. Technical Report 00-14, Chalmers University of Technology, Goeteborg, Sweden.
  14. Möller, T. and Trumbore, B. (1997). Fast, Minimum Storage Ray-Triangle Intersection. J. Graph. Tools, 2(1):21-28.
  15. Molnar, S., Cox, M., Ellsworth, D., and Fuchs, H. (1994). A Sorting Classification of Parallel Rendering. IEEE Computer Graphics and Algorithms, pages 23-32.
  16. Owens, J. D., Luebke, D., Govindaraju, N., Harris, M., Kr üger, J., Lefohn, A. E., and Purcell, T. J. (2005). A Survey of General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware. In Eurographics 2005, State of the Art Reports, pages 21-51.
  17. Purcell, T. J., Buck, I., Mark, W. R., and Hanrahan, P. (2002). Ray Tracing on Programmable Graphics Hardware. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 21(3):703-712.
  18. Reshetov, A., Soupikov, A., and Hurley, J. (2005). MultiLevel Ray Tracing Algorithm. ACM Trans. Graph., 24(3):1176-1185.
  19. Salesin, D. and Stolfi, J. (1989). The ZZ-Buffer: A Simple and Efficient Rendering Algorithm with Reliable Antialiasing. In Proceedings of the PIXIM 7889 Conference, pages 451-66.
  20. Simonsen, L. O. and Thrane, N. (2005). A Comparison of Acceleration Structures for GPU Assisted Ray Tracing. Master's thesis, University of Aarhus.
  21. Sutherland, I. E., Sproull, R. F., and Schumacker, R. A. (1974). A Characterization of Ten Hidden-Surface Algorithms. ACM Comput. Surv., 6(1):1-55.
  22. Wald, I., Benthin, C., and Slusallek, P. (2003). Distributed Interactive Ray Tracing of Dynamic Scenes. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Large-Data Visualization and Graphics (PVG) , pages 77-85.
  23. Wald, I. and Havran, V. (2006). On building fast Kd-Trees for Ray Tracing, and on doing that in O(N log N). In Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, pages 61-69.
  24. Weghorst, H., Hooper, G., and Greenberg, D. P. (1984). Improved Computational Methods for Ray Tracing. ACM Trans. Graph., 3(1):52-69.
  25. Weiskopf, D., Schafhitzel, T., and Ertl, T. (2004). GPUBased Nonlinear Ray Tracing. In Eurographics 2004, volume 23, pages 625-633.
  26. Williams, L. (1978). Casting curved shadows on curved surfaces. In SIGGRAPH 7878: Proceedings of the 5th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, pages 270-274, New York, NY, USA. ACM Press.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

C. D. Robert P., Schoepke S. and Bieri H. (2007). HYBRID RAY TRACING - Ray Tracing Using GPU-Accelerated Image-Space Methods . In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP, ISBN 978-972-8865-71-9, pages 305-311. DOI: 10.5220/0002081603050311


in Bibtex Style

@conference{grapp07,
author={Philippe C. D. Robert and Severin Schoepke and Hanspeter Bieri},
title={HYBRID RAY TRACING - Ray Tracing Using GPU-Accelerated Image-Space Methods},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP,},
year={2007},
pages={305-311},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002081603050311},
isbn={978-972-8865-71-9},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP,
TI - HYBRID RAY TRACING - Ray Tracing Using GPU-Accelerated Image-Space Methods
SN - 978-972-8865-71-9
AU - C. D. Robert P.
AU - Schoepke S.
AU - Bieri H.
PY - 2007
SP - 305
EP - 311
DO - 10.5220/0002081603050311