Review of Real-Time Ray Tracing Technique Research

Abstract

Ray tracing has been regarded as the next generation of mainstream image rendering technology for a long time because of the authenticity of its rendering effect, and it is a hot research point in the field of computer graphics. In recent years, academics and commercials have extensively researched real-time ray tracing. To promote the research of real-time ray tracing, this paper reviews, analyses, and summaries the related literature. Firstly, the concept, algorithms, and classification of acceleration structures are introduced. Three commercial graphics processing units (GPU) supporting ray tracing are introduced and the differences between them are compared. This paper summarizes the optimization of ray tracing from six aspects, ray packet, stackless traversal, ray reorder, wide BVH, denoising techniques, and real-time ray tracing combined with the artificial?neural network, and expounds on the advantages and disadvantages of the relevant specific methods. Based on the acceleration of the algorithms, the hardware acceleration method on GPU and the dedicated architectures are summarized. Finally, this paper makes a brief summary of the content, points out the difficulties that real-time ray tracing is still challenged, and looks forward to the future development direction. It can help researchers systematically understand real-time ray tracing status and provide follow-up research ideas.

Keywords

• rendering; ray tracing; graphics processing unit (gpu); domain-specific architecture