CUDA Real Time Ray Tracer

An exploration of physically-based rendering and GPU programming.

Features

• Physically-based rendering of full 3D scenes in real-time
• Reflective and refractive materials
• Soft shadows and depth of field
• Capable of rendering complex scenes at high framerates

Stack

Written in CUDA C++. The GPU implementation parallelises ray calculations across thousands of threads, with work batched by bounce depth to minimise thread divergence and keep performance consistent across complex scenes.

Implementation

Built as a feature-complete CPU ray tracer first, then ported to CUDA to parallelise per-pixel ray calculations across the GPU. Each frame is computed on the GPU and passed back to OpenGL for display in a GLFW window, giving real-time output rather than rendering to a static image file.