A theoretical and empirical analysis of coherent ray-tracing

The use of coherence has been advocated as a means of reducing the large computational cost of the ray-tracing method of image synthesis. This paper examines the theoretical and empirical performance of a typical coherent ray-tracing algorithm, one that exploits the similarity between the intersection trees generated by successive rays. It is shown that despite the large degree of coherence present in a scene, the need to ensure the validity of ray-object intersections prevents any significant computational savings. This indicates that other algorithmic methods must be used in order to substantially reduce the computational cost of ray-traced imagery.

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