The use of coherent ray tracing for physically accurate rendering
B. Kh. Barladyan, Alexey Gennadievich Voloboy, K. A. Vostryakov, Vladimir Alexandrovich Galaktionov, Lev Zalmanovich Shapiro · Programming and Computer Software · 2008
As the power of modern microprocessors increases, the coherent ray tracing becomes increasingly popular in computer graphics because the use of SIMD instructions considerably speeds up this operation. However, after speeding up ray tracing, it turns out that other algorithms for physically accurate rendering, such as the calculation of illumination or application of texture, etc., become a bottleneck in improving the performance. In this paper, a coherent physically accurate rendering algorithm is proposed that makes use of SIMD instructions of modern processors at each stage of the image generation. Coherent algorithms for the calculation of illumination and materials, for antialiasing, and for tone mapping are presented. The comparison of the execution time of coherent and incoherent algorithms using benchmark scenes showed that the former are considerably faster.