A graphics architecture for ray tracing and photon mapping

by Ling, Junyi

Recently, methods were developed to render various global illumination e?ects with rasterization GPUs. Among those were hardware based ray tracing and photon mapping. However, due to current GPU??s inherent architectural limitations, the e?ciency and throughput of these methods remained low. In this thesis, we propose a coherent rendering system that addresses these issues. First, we introduce new photon mapping and ray racing acceleration algorithms that facilitate data coherence and spatial locality, as well as eliminating unnecessary random memory accesses. A high level abstraction of the combined ray tracing and photon mapping streaming pipeline is introduced. Based on this abstraction, an e?cient ray tracing and photon mapping GPU is designed. Using an event driven simulator, developed for this GPU, we verify and validate the proposed algorithms and architecture. Simulation results have validated better interactive performances compared to the current GPUs.