GPU Path Tracing

The goal of this work is to verify the possibility to utilize GPU for global illumination computations in a commercial software environment and explore an efficient way to do it. Path tracing with BVH as the acceleration data structure was implemented on GPU using CUDA successfully. It was arranged as a pipelined structure which supported mulitple texture types and light source types. And it also proved to be efficient in execution and compact in memory. A light tree structure was introduced in this work as well, which grouped light sources with an affecting radius hierarchically and enabled the path tracer to handle massive light sources efficiently. Testings and analyses were also made for different configurations to utilize the light tree.

[1]  Jan Kautz,et al.  Precomputed radiance transfer for real-time rendering in dynamic, low-frequency lighting environments , 2002 .

[2]  Sven Woop,et al.  A Ray Tracing Hardware Architecture for Dynamic Scenes , 2004 .

[3]  Kun Zhou,et al.  An efficient GPU-based approach for interactive global illumination , 2009, SIGGRAPH 2009.

[4]  I. Wald,et al.  On fast Construction of SAH-based Bounding Volume Hierarchies , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing.

[5]  E. Mansson,et al.  Deep Coherent Ray Tracing , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing.

[6]  Vlastimil Havran,et al.  Ray Tracing on a GPU with CUDA – Comparative Study of Three Algorithms , 2010 .

[7]  Kun Zhou,et al.  Real-time KD-tree construction on graphics hardware , 2008, SIGGRAPH 2008.

[8]  Tomas Akenine-Möller,et al.  Real-Time Rendering, Third Edition , 2008 .

[9]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  Imperfect shadow maps for efficient computation of indirect illumination , 2008, SIGGRAPH Asia '08.

[10]  Jan Kautz,et al.  Packet-based whitted and distribution ray tracing , 2007, GI '07.

[11]  Philippe Bekaert,et al.  Advanced global illumination , 2006 .

[12]  Pat Hanrahan,et al.  Ray tracing on programmable graphics hardware , 2002, SIGGRAPH Courses.

[13]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  EUROGRAPHICS 2007 / D. Cohen-Or and P. Slavík (Guest Editors) Stackless KD-Tree Traversal for High Performance GPU Ray Tracing , 2022 .

[14]  H.-P. Seidel,et al.  Realtime Ray Tracing on GPU with BVH-based Packet Traversal , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing.

[15]  G. Greiner,et al.  Early Split Clipping for Bounding Volume Hierarchies , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing.

[16]  Timo Aila,et al.  Understanding the efficiency of ray traversal on GPUs , 2009, High Performance Graphics.

[17]  H. Jensen,et al.  Progressive photon mapping , 2008, SIGGRAPH 2008.

[18]  Carsten Dachsbacher,et al.  Reflective shadow maps , 2005, I3D '05.