Ray tracing API integration for OpenGL applications

Abstract

Ray tracing is one of the most important rendering techniques in computer graphics. By means of simulating reflection and refraction of light transportation, ray tracing generates more photorealistic images than scanline rendering. However, the high computational cost is the main disadvantage of ray tracing algorithm. In recent years, the computing power of GPU has increased dramatically, and general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) has become popular. Many scholars have presented some physically based rendering methods with CUDA or OpenCL in order to improve image quality and increase rendering speed. Because rasterization is the mainstream in the gaming industry, there is still a long way to go to make ray tracing accepted by the industry in the near future. We introduce a ray tracing API integration for OpenGL applications that can replace the original OpenGL rasterization with ray tracing by simply adding a few lines of code, and the ray tracing algorithm in this API is parallelized by OpenCL.