Hardware Challenges for Ray Tracing and Radiosity Algorithms

Abstract

Computer graphics algorithms and graphics hardware have mainly been developed along two lines: real-time display and realistic display. Real-time display has been achieved by developing dedicated hardware for projective, depth-buffer display algorithms.Increased realism has been achieved by ray tracing and radiosity algorithms,which generally are implemented on standard workstations because the complexity of the computation makes it difficult to implement these algorithms in hardware. Inthis paper we review these different approaches and discuss the feasibility of usingspecial hardware to enhance the radiosity and ray tracing computation. In particularwe will explore the use of the intersection of a frustrum of rays with patches in a sceneas a basic computational primitive for these algorithms and their implementation inhardware.K eywords and phrases: rendering, radiosity, ray tracing, graphics hardware, parallelprocessing.