Accelerating Ray Tracing using FPGAs (DAAV)

Ray tracing is nowadays one of the most important techniques to render images based on
a three-dimensional scene at a high quality level. It allows the tracing of rays in a physically
based manner, which in turn increases the photo-realism of the renderings. Photorealistic
rendering techniques that are based on ray tracing, such as path tracing [8],
generally provide a much simpler implementation than other rendering techniques, such
as those based on rasterization. For example, for rendering a mirror, a rasterizer has to
render the image from the perspective of the mirror in order to generate a texture of the
mirror surface before actually rendering the scene. In contrast to that, photo-realistic
ray-tracing techniques are inherently capable of rendering such effects without additional
implementation effort.