Interactive global illumination using fast ray tracing
Ingo Wald, Thomas Kollig, Carsten Benthin, Alexander Keller, Philipp Slusallek · 2002
Rasterization hardware provides interactive frame rates for rendering dynamic scenes, but lacks the ability of ray tracing required for efficient global illumination simulation. Existing ray tracing based methods yield high quality renderings but are far too slow for interactive use. We present a new parallel rendering algorithm that perfectly scales, has minimal preprocessing and communication overhead, applies highly efficient sampling techniques based on randomized quasi-Monte Carlo integration, and benefits from a fast parallel ray tracing implementation by shooting coherent groups of rays. Thus a performance is achieved that allows for applying arbitrary changes to the scene, while approximating global illumination including shadows from area light sources, indirect illumination, specular effects, and caustics at interactive frame rates. Ceizing interaction rapidly provides high quality renderings.