Razor

Abstract

Recent work demonstrates that interactive ray tracing is possible on desktop systems, but there is still much debate as to how to most efficiently support advanced visual effects such as soft shadows, smooth freeform surfaces, complex shading, and animated scenes. With these challenges in mind, we reconsider the options for designing a rendering system and present Razor, a new software rendering architecture for distribution ray tracing designed to produce high-quality images with high performance on future singlechip many-core hardware. Razor includes two noteworthy capabilities: a set of techniques for quickly building the kd-tree acceleration structure on demand every frame from a scene graph and a system design that allows for crack-free multiresolution geometry with each ray independently choosing its geometry resolution. Razor's per-frame kd-tree build is designed to robustly handle arbitrarily scene animation, while its per-ray multiresolution geometry provides continuous level of detail driven by ray and path differentials. Razor also decouples shading from visibility computations W. Hunt, I. Elhassan, and W. R. Mark were at the University of Texas at Austin during the period that most of this work was conducted.

Real‐Time Ray Tracing of Micro‐Poly Geometry with Hierarchical Level of Detail

“…Another popular approach that explores LOD generation for ray tracing is the Razor system proposed by Djeu et al [DHW*11]. The Razor system uses a multi‐resolution geometry cache.…”