A Ray Tracing Hardware Architecture for Dynamic Scenes

This thesis describes a ray tracing hardware architecture for dynamic scenes that makes it possible to ray trace highly complex scenes in real time. Ray tracing of dynamic scenes does not seem to be efficiently possible, as ray tracing requires an acceleration structure whose creation is very costly. The well-known solution to this problem is to partition the scene into movable objects, which causes to use a top-level acceleration structure over the objects, and a bottom-level acceleration structure in each object. The presented architecture efficiently supports such partitioned scenes by using one transformation unit for both the triangle intersection and the object space transformation. A prototype of the hardware architecture has been implemented into an FPGA which is in fact the first working special purpose real time ray tracing hardware available today. The performance and implementation details of this prototype are discussed in detail at the end of this thesis.

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