Performance of Space Subdivision Techniques in Ray Tracing

Abstract

Whilst providing images of excellent quality, ray tracing is a computationally intensive task. The first part of this paper compares the speed-up achieved in ray tracing using various space subdivision algorithms and discusses the implications of implementing the algorithms on parallel processing systems. The second part addresses the problem of building the data structure within the rendering process, a situation which occurs when the rendering process is parallelised and dynamic scenes are rendered. Greater performance can be achieved with dynamic structure building compared to creation of the structure prior to rendering. The dynamic building algorithm proposed reduces the building time and storage cost of space subdivision structures, and decreases the data structure creation-render cycle time, thus enhancing image parallelism performance.