Ray tracing

We present a technique for real-time ray tracing with the goal of reaching 240 frames per second or more. The core idea is to trade spatial resolution for faster temporal updates in such a way that the display and human visual system aid in …

The traditional quadratic formula is often presented as the way to compute the intersection of a ray with a sphere. While mathematically correct, this factorization can be numerically unstable when using floating-point arithmetic. We give two …

We describe simple methods for how to filter environment maps using ray cones and ray differentials in a ray tracing engine.

Unlike rasterization, where one can rely on pixel quad partial derivatives, an alternative approach must be taken for filtered texturing during ray tracing. We describe two methods for computing texture level of detail for ray tracing. The first …

We define a ray, show how to use ray intervals, and demonstrate how to specify a ray using DirectX Raytracing (DXR).

Modern graphics APIs such as DirectX 12 expose low-level hardware access and control to developers, often resulting in complex and verbose code that can be intimidating for novices. In this chapter, we hope to demystify the steps to set up and use …

Interactive ray tracing applications running on commodity hardware can suffer from objectionable temporal artifacts due to a low sample count. We introduce stable ray tracing, a technique that improves temporal stability without the over-blurring and …

We introduce the Symmetric GGX (SGGX) distribution to represent spatially-varying properties of anisotropic microflake participating media. Our key theoretical insight is to represent a microflake distribution by the projected area of the …

Indirect illumination is an important element for realistic image synthesis, but its computation is expensive and highly dependent on the complexity of the scene and of the BRDF of the involved surfaces. While off-line computation and pre-baking can …