A multiview and multilayer approach for interactive ray tracing

Abstract

We introduce a generic method for interactive ray tracing, able to support complex and dynamic environments, without the need for precomputations or the maintenance of additional spatial data structures. Our method, which relies entirely on the rasterization pipeline, stores fragment information for the entire scene on a multiview and multilayer structure and marches through depth layers to capture both near and distant information for illumination computations. Ray tracing is efficiently achieved by concurrently traversing a novel cube-mapped A-buffer variant in image space that exploits GPU-accelerated double linked lists, decoupled storage, uniform depth subdivision and empty space skipping on a per-fragment basis. We illustrate the effectiveness and quality of our approach on path tracing and ambient occlusion implementations in scenarios, where full scene coverage is of major importance. Finally, we report on the performance and memory usage of our pipeline and compare it against GPGPU ray tracing approaches.