| Submitted by , posted on 05 January 2005 |

Image Description, by These are some images from my latest (yet unnamed) ray tracer. Everyone has seen the bunny a thousand times now so I'm throwing in a real time demo as well. :-) As you can see, so far I have been focussing on raw performance. The ray tracer now fully implements Ingo Wald's packet tracing: Whenever possible, four rays are cast simultaneously and traversed through a kd-tree. By using packets, the ray tracer becomes very suitable for vectorization using sse/sse2 instructions. Despite some overhead this approach doubles the speed of a regular raytracer.
About the images: The top left image shows the famous Stanford Bunny model, 69k triangles. There are two (dynamic) light sources in this scene, and the animation is rendered at 512x384 pixels. On my 1.7Ghz Pentium-M laptop this runs at about 5 frames per second. To the right of this image a dump of the matching kd-tree is shown.
The two lower images show the Happy Buddha model and the matching kd-tree, which consists of no less than 1089k triangles. This model renders slightly slower; on my system it runs at about 4 frames per second.
This brings up a very interesting characteristic of ray tracing: The technology scales very well. Switching from 69k to 1089k triangles only means that some extra levels are added to the kd-tree; the speed decrease is therefore not linear at all. Besides that, ray tracing performance scales virtually linearly with processing power and the number of available processors. This means that, given a sufficiently complex scene, it's possible to outperform high-end graphics cards using commodity hardware.
Also interesting is the fact that the ray tracing algorithm is very simple. 750 lines of code get me 'z-buffering' with virtually unlimited accuracy, visibility determination, self-shadowing, recursive reflections and refractions, hard and / or soft shadows, per-pixel lighting, HDR effects and so on.
I'm currently working with Thierry Berger-Perrin to produce a more interesting demo, perhaps similar to the famous RealStorm benchmark. In the meantime, you can download the bunny demo (3.8MB).
Greets
Jacco Bikker

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