People like ray-tracing..

A siggraph demo showed off a new 'fast' raytracing app. Entirely written in CUDA; which seems odd that they consider this a ‘breakthrough idea’ … using a multithreaded teraflop SIMD processor for millions of rays *GASP!*


IMHO, Arauna seems much more impressive for CPU side RTRT , (with free source code) ! simply because I consider CUDA / OPENCL a mild fad when compared with more general computing promise of many-core / LRB setups.. (but that’s just me…)

Although not real time, it’s worth looking at is SmallPT, it’s an entire path tracer in 99 lines of code. That has a higher-performance CUDA version written by another developer .

And if this sort of thing interests you, you really want to download TinyRT , a grouping of raytracing template containers. I think some of their containers are TOO generic, and thus loses some performance quality. But I always side on the concept that hand-optimized code for a specific platform will out-perform most containers.


Which all of this is funny to see a siggraph style conference devoted to ray tracing, even though it's been around for 30+ years now. : http://www.sci.utah.edu/rt08/

Viva la history.

~Main