Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

15

Adding Reflections with Ray Tracing

In this chapter, we are going to implement reflections using ray tracing. Before ray tracing hardware was introduced, applications implemented reflections using screen-space techniques. However, this technique has drawbacks as it can only use information from what’s visible on the screen. If one of the rays goes outside the visible geometry on the screen, we usually fall back to an environment map. Because of this limitation, the rendered reflections can be inconsistent, depending on the camera position.

By introducing ray tracing hardware, we can overcome this limitation as we now have access to geometry that is not visible on the screen. The downside is that we might need to perform some expensive lighting ...