Interactive ray tracing of free-form surfaces
Carsten Benthin, Ingo Wald, Philipp Slusallek · 2004
Even though the speed of software ray tracing has recently been increased to interactive performance even on standard PCs, these systems usually only supported triangles as geometric primitives. Directly handling free-form surfaces such as spline or subdivision surfaces instead of first tesselating them offers many advantages such as higher precision results, reduced memory requirements, and faster preprocessing due to less primitives. However, existing algorithms for ray tracing free-form surfaces are much too slow for interactive use.