Realtime Ray Tracing of Dynamic Scenes on an FPGA Chip

Abstract

Realtime ray tracing has recently established itself as a possible alternative to the current rasterization approach for interactive 3D graphics. However, the performance of existing software implementations is still severely limited by today's CPUs, requiring many CPUs for achieving realtime performance. In this paper we present a prototype implementation of the full ray tracing pipeline on a single FPGA chip. Running at only 90 MHz it achieves realtime frame rates of 20 to 60 frames per second over a wide range of 3D scenes and includes support for texturing, multiple light sources, and multiple levels of reflection or transparency. A particular interesting feature of the design is the re-use of the transformation unit necessary for supporting dynamic scenes also for other tasks, including efficient ray-triangle intersection as well as shading computations. Despite the additional support for dynamic scenes this approach reduces the overall hardware cost by 68 %. We evaluate the design and its implementation across a wide set of example scenes and demonstrate the benefits of dedicated realtime ray tracing hardware.