Real Time Ray Tracing of Analytic and Implicit Surfaces

Abstract

Real-time ray-tracing debuted to consumer GPU hardware in 2018. Primary examples however, have been of hybrid raster and ray-tracing methods that are restricted to triangle mesh geometry. Our research looks at the viability of procedural methods in the real-time setting. We give implementations of analytical and implicit geometry in the domain of the global illumination algorithms bi-directional path-tracing, and GPU Photon-Mapping – both of which we have adapted to the new ray-tracing shader stages, as shown in Figure 1. Despite procedural intersections being more expensive than triangle intersections in Nvidia’s RTX hardware, our results show that these descriptions still run at interactive rates within computationally expensive multi-pass ray-traced global illumination and demonstrate the practical benefits of the geometry.