GPU Pro 6

1

V

Hybrid Ray Tracing on a

PowerVR GPU

Gareth Morgan

1.1 Introduction

Ray tracing and rasterization are often presented as a dichotomy. Since the

early days of computer graphics, ray tracing has been the gold standard for

visual realism. By allowing physically accurate simulation of light transport, ray

tracing renders extremely high-quality images. Real-time rendering, on the other

hand, is dominated by rasterization. In spite of being less physically accurate,

rasterization can be accelerated by efficient, commonly available GPUs and has

mature standardized programing interfaces.

This chapter describes how an existing raster-based game engine renderer