A general two-level acceleration structure for interactive ray tracing on the GPU

Despite the superior image quality generated by ray tracing, programmers of time-critical applications have historically avoided it because of its computational costs. Nowadays, the hardware of modern desktops allows the execution of realtime ray tracers but requires a specialized implementation based on specific characteristics of each application, such as scene complexity, kinds of motion, ray distribution, model structure and hardware. The evaluation and development of these requirements are complex and time-consuming, especially for developers with no familiarity in rendering algorithms and graphics hardware programming. The aim of our work is to provide a general and practical method to efficiently execute interactive ray tracing in most systems. We considered the most common aspects of current computer graphics applications, like the use of a scene graph and support to static and dynamic objects. In addition, we also took into account the common desktop hardware. This led us to the development of a special acceleration structure and its implementation on the GPU. In this paper, we present the development of our work showing the combination of different techniques and our results.