Make Ray Tracing Great Again!

Scott Gordon
Sacramento State University, Sacramento, CA

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

In the field of 3D graphics, ray tracing is a technique for generating stunningly realistic lighting effects.  However, it also places a heavy demand on computing resources.  In other words, it's slow!  But in 2018, NVIDIA unveiled hardware ray-tracing support on its Turing microarchitecture consumer GPUs.  Now ray-tracing has become a hot topic again, and so this talk will demonstrate programming techniques for achieving ray tracing using compute shaders.  The speaker is the author of the "Computer Graphics Programming in OpenGL" series of textbooks for C++ and Java, published by Mercury Learning.