TigerSHARK : A Hardware Accelerated Ray-tracing Engine

The current state of the art in graphics rendering algorithms and hardware is surveyed, and it is shown that ray-tracing, despite lar ger computational requirements than conventional algorithms, is more amenable to massive parallelism. The T ig rSHARK ray-tracing architecture is then presented as an extremely cost-ef fectiv means to exploit this fundamental parallelism. A competing approach is analyzed, and the T igerSHARK SIMD-variant architecture shown superior due to its use of low-cost high-performance reprogrammable computing elements and specialized architecture. Prototype hardware is briefly described. The system produces extremely high-quality output, efficiently using low-cost hardware to rival the rendering speeds of systems three orders of magnitude more expensive.

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