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Real-Time Ray Tracing (RTRT)

Ray-tracing offers a software-based rendering solution as an alternative to conventional graphics hardware. This software-based approach provides natural support for complex lighting and shading algorithms, and the direct rendering of large-scale datasets and higher-order primitives. Ray-tracing is especially appropriate for applications in which the number of polygons significantly exceeds the number of pixels on the screen. Highly tuned to the unique architecture of SGI's Origin series, the Star-Ray interactive ray-tracer realizes near-linear speed-up, scaling to 1024 CPUs, easily rendering multi-gigabyte datasets at interactive rates.

Scalable

  • Delivers linear speed-up on scalable SGI architectures; sub-linear performance impact with increasing scene complexity.

Flexible

  • Provides a framework for complex materials and shaders, including metal, marble, dielectrics, Phong, Lambertian, and others.

Interactive

  • Supports dynamic changes to object location, shape, and surface properties, as well as volumetric transparency.

Technical Highlights:

  • Direct rendering of higher-order primitives
  • Flexible shading methods
  • True volume rendering
  • Linear performance: scales with hardware
  • Shared memory advantages
  • No graphics I/O bottleneck
  • Photorealistic effects
  • Adaptive image quality

The living room features interactive navigation of a realistic scene including high-resolution polygonal models with a richness of textures. This demonstrates the ability of ray tracing to capture the subtle of play of light across and through detailed models. Here we feature a complex scene with millions of polygons and hundreds of megabytes of textures.

Principal Researchers: