Heuristic based real-time hybrid rendering with the use of rasterization and ray tracing method

Nowadays, rasterization is the most common method used to achieve real-time semi-photorealistic effects in games or interactive applications. Some of those effects are not easily achievable, thus require more complicated methods and are difficult to obtain. The appearance of the presented worlds depends to a large extent on the approximation to the physical basis of light behaviour in them. The best effects in this regard are global illumination algorithms. Each of them including ray tracing give the most plausible effects, but at cost of higher computational complexity. Today’s hardware allows usage of ray tracing methods in-real time on Graphics Processing Units (GPU) thanks to its parallel nature. However, using ray tracing as a single rendering method may still result in poor performance, especially when used to create many image effects in complex environments. In this paper we present a hybrid approach for real-time rendering using both rasterization and ray tracing using heuristic, which determines whether to render secondary effects such as shadows, reflections and refractions for individual objects considering their relevancy and cost of rendering those effects for these objects in particular case.