Selective Rasterized Ray-traced Reflections on the GPU

Abstract

Ray-tracing achieves impressive effects such as realistic reflections on complex surfaces but is also more computationally expensive than classic rasterization. Rasterized ray-tracing methods can accelerate ray-tracing by taking advantage of the massive parallelization available in the rasterization pipeline on the GPU. In this paper, we propose a selective rasterized raytracing method that optimizes the rasterized ray-tracing by selectively allocating computational resources to reflective regions in the image. Our experiments suggest that the method can speed-up the computation by up to 4 times and also reduce the memory footprint by almost 66% without affecting the image quality. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using complex scenes and animations.