Ray tracing via GPU rasterization

Wei Hu, Yangyu Huang, Fan Zhang, Guodong Yuan, Wei Li

Abstract: Ray tracing is a dominant method for generating a wide variety of global illumination effects, such as reflections/refractions, shadows, etc. In this paper, we propose an efficient technique to perform nearly accurate ray tracing using the programmable graphics processor units (GPUs). With the aid of the linked-list A-buffer and the uniform voxel grid to represent scene geometry, the ray-scene intersection can be efficiently computed via the built-in rasterization on GPUs. Based on this novel ray-scene intersection technique, a new ray-tracing framework which supports various light transport algorithms is introduced, including Ray Casting, Whitted Ray tracing, Ambient Occlusion, Path Tracing, and so on. The experimental results demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our approach.