Presenter: Philipp Slusallek, Saarland University, Germany

Abstract:

It is now possible to perform realtime ray tracing on PCs in software on a single CPU with up to 7 million rays per second for simple scenes. Using a cluster of PCs allows to easily scale to fully interactive performance even for scenes of tens of millions and even billions of polygons including highly complex shading. With new lighting simulation algorithms we can now also fully recompute global illumination at realtime frame rates.

In my talk I will present the OpenRT realtime ray tracing engine, discuss how its performance and scalability was achieved, and point out consequences of these recent developments in research and industry. In addition I will address current research activities at Saarland University and discuss a number of open research problems in this field.