I was reading up on real time ray tracing and stumbled upon this demo:
http://www.flipcode.com/cgi-bin/fcarticles.cgi?show=65091
it is one of the best such demos that I've seen.
I thought I'd try my hand at remaking the demo using OpenGL instead of ray
tracing:
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/bunny/
When hardware accelerated, the OpenGL-based renderer can render the same
image over 100x faster than the real time ray tracer with 1/10th as much
code.
But I noticed something else interesting. When my graphics drivers were
broken and OpenGL resorted to software rendering, it was still faster than
the ray tracer.
This leads me to think that a z-buffer (or s-buffer) might be a better way
to render primary rays in a ray tracer. Tracing ray bundles seems like a
first step in this direction.
PS: Anyone got any links to better real time ray tracing demos?
--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
Objective CAML for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/index.html?usenet
