Acceleration of ray tracing method using predictive evaluation and GPGPU technology

Ray tracing is one of computer graphics methods for achieving the most realistic outputs. Its main disadvantage is high computation demands. Removal of this disadvantage is possible using parallelization due to the fact that the ray tracing method is inherently parallel. Solution presented in this article uses GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units) technology and a predictive evaluation for the acceleration of ray tracing method. The CUDA C was selected as a GPGPU language and it was used for a conversion of a raytracer core. The main reason for choosing this language was usage of the Tesla C1060 graphics card. The predictive evaluation of a scene was based on the fact that total computation time increases proportionally with resolution. This evaluation allows selection of the optimal scene division for the parallel ray tracing. In tests, proposed GPGPU solution reached accelerations up to 28.3× comparing to CPU.