Ray Tracing

This picture is not real but rendered by 3D graphics algorithm. This high quality image can be rendered by using various advanced global illumination algorithms. Global illumination requires entire scene data for its input to render high quality images. However, traditional rasterization hardware is not able to access a whole scene at a time. Therefore, it is not suitable to implement global illumination such as shadow, reflection, and refraction effects. Ray Tracing is one of the solutions to implement global illuminations. Ray tracing makes it possible to render high quality images, but requires high computation power. Recently, computation power of graphics hardware is increased up to Tera FLOPS, so this leads Ray Tracing hardwares to achieve real-time rendering performance under a simple application. Our research interest is to improve rendering performance of ray tracing hardware on mobile platform.