Abstract
Today any new computer is already equipped with powerful 3D graphics hardware. These graphics chips are significantly more complex than the main CPU and outperform the large graphics supercomputers of only 2-3 years ago. Even though we have seen a dramatic success of 3D graphics hardware in the last few years, there are an increasing number of problems associated with the underlying technology, including
Even though ray-tracing is usually seen as the antithesis to interactive 3D graphics, this technology offers a number of benefits to overcome these problems even for interactive applications.
In the talk I will present the interactive ray-tracing system developed at Saarland University. Using a new coherent algorithm and an optimized software implementation we improved the performance of ray-tracing by a factor of ~15. This allows us to achieve interactive performance even on a single PC. For complex scenes our system outperforms even the best 3D graphics hardware (e.g. Onyx or Nvidia). At the same time the ray-tracing algorithm allows for rendering optical effects such as shadows, exact reflection, and refraction as well as easily implementing advanced shading operations. Using the coherent algorithm the system also scales to distributed rendering system without the need to replicate the scene data.
At the end of the talk I will try to sketch a future of interactive 3D graphics based on ray-tracing.