Keynote

NHTV University of Applied Sciences

Real-time Ray Tracing through the Eyes of a Game Developer

There has been and is a tremendous amount of research going on on the topic of ray tracing, spurred by the relatively recent advent of real-time ray tracing and the inevitable appearance of consumer hardware capable of handling this rendering algorithm. Besides researchers, the prospect of a brave new world attracts hobbyists (such as demo coders) and game developers: Ray tracing promises an elegant and fascinating alternative to z-buffer approaches, as well as more intuitive graphics and games development. This speech provides a view from the inside on ray tracing in games and demos, where the emphasis is on performance and short-term practical usability. It covers the way science is applied, the unique contribution of these developers to the field and their link with the research community.

The Arauna ray tracer, developed at the NHTV university of applied science, is used as an example of a ray tracer that has been specifically build with games and performance in mind. It's purpose and architecture, as well as some implementation details are presented.

Papers

Session 1: Primitives for Ray Tracing

Interactive Ray Tracing of Arbitrary Implicits with SIMD Interval Arithmetic

Aaron Knoll, Younis Hijazi, Charles Hansen, Ingo Wald, Hans Hagen

Ray-Strips: A Compact Mesh Representation for Interactive Ray Tracing

Christian Lauterbach, Sung-Eui Yoon, Dinesh Manocha

Session 2: Construction of Acceleration Hierarchies

Grid Creation Strategies for Efficient Ray Tracing

Thiago Ize, Peter Shirley, Steven Parker

On fast Construction of SAH-based Bounding Volume Hierarchies

Ingo Wald

Terminating Spatial Hierarchies by A Priori Bounding Memory

Carsten Wächter, Alexander Keller

Fast and Lazy Build of Acceleration Structures from Scene Hierarchies

Warren Hunt, William Mark, Donald Fussell

Session 3: Use of Acceleration Hierarchies

A Study of Restricted BSP Trees for Ray Tracing

Ravi Kammaje, Benjamin Mora

Coupled Use of BSP and BVH Trees in Order to Exploit Ray Bundle Performance

Gilles Cadet, Bernard Lécussan

Early Split Clipping for Bounding Volume Hierarchies

Manfred Ernst, Günther Greiner

Session 4: Coherency and Ray Packet Tracing

Deep Coherent Ray Tracing

Erik Månsson, Jacob Munkberg, Tomas Akenine-Möller

SIMD Packet Techniques for Photon Mapping

Shawn Singh, Petros Faloutsos

Dynamic Ray Scheduling to Improve Ray Coherence and Bandwidth Utilization

Paul Navrátil, Donald Fussell, Calvin Lin, William Mark

Faster Ray Packets - Triangle Intersection through Vertex Culling

Alexander Reshetov

Session 5: Special Architectures for Ray Tracing

Realtime Ray Tracing on GPU with BVH-based Packet Traversal

Johannes Günther, Stefan Popov, Hans-Peter Seidel, Philipp Slusallek

Towards Hardware Ray Tracing using Fixed Point Arithmetic

Johannes Hanika, Alexander Keller

Session 6: Sampling and Shading

Poisson Disk Point Sets by Hierarchical Dart Throwing

Kenric White, David Cline, Parris Egbert

Steerable Stratified Importance Sampling

Kartic Subr, James Arvo

Adaptive Spatial Sample Caching

Andreas Dietrich, Philipp Slusallek

RTSL: a Ray Tracing Shading Language

Steven Parker, Solomon Boulos, James Bigler, Austin Robison

Session 7: Applications of Ray Tracing

Interactive Realistic Simulation of Wireless Networks

Steffen Moser, Frank Kargl, Alexander Keller

Bullet Ray Vision

Lee Butler, Abe Stephens

A Visualization Framework for Time Dependent Metal Casting Simulations

Matthias Groß, Carsten Lojewski, Hans Hagen

Posters

Hybrid Visualization: Interactive CPU Ray Casting Combined with GPU Rasterization

Matthias Groß, Carsten Lojewski, Hans Hagen

Ray-Frustum Tracing for Interactive Sound Propagation

Christian Lauterbach, Anish Chandak, Dinesh Manocha

A Comparison of Tabular PDF Inversion Methods

David Cline, Peter Wonka, Anshuman Razdan

Global Illumination for Non-Tesselated Trimmed NURBS Scenes

Oliver Abert, Maik Stange, Stefan Müller

Testing Ray Tracing Algorithms

Christian Kempter, Alexander Keller

RDH: Ray Distribution Heuristics for Construction of Spatial Data Structures

Jiři Bittner, Vlastimil Havran

SIMD Ray Stream Tracing

Ingo Wald, Christiaan Gribble, Solomon Boulos, Andrew Kensler

A State Table Algorithm for Direct Ray Tracing of CSG Models

Andrew Kensler