This CD is an addition of the master thesis by Antonin Hildebrand.
(c) 2004 Antonin Hildebrand, http://inferno.hildebrand.cz

Title: Raytracing accelerated by modern graphics hardware
Author: Antonin Hildebrand
Department: Kabinet software a vyuky informatiky
Supervisor: RNDr. Josef Pelikan

Abstract: Recent advances in consumer graphics hardware have made significant
progress. Recently fixed function graphics chips have been replaced with programmable
graphics processor units (GPUs). New flexibility in graphics hardware has
opened a new field of research. There is a possibility to move some algorithms from
CPU to GPU. The main motivation is to use horsepower of GPU and off-load CPU.
The thesis investigates how to map ray tracing method onto modern graphics hardware.
The first chapters are dedicated to introduction of modern graphics hardware,
presentation of general processing on GPUs and survey of raytracing method. Previous
work discussion and problem analysis follows.
A new method of raytracing on GPU is introduced, it is based on previous analysis.
The method is implemented using latest programmable graphics hardware and
was benchmarked. Results has shown that raytracing method can be fully computed
in GPU, but it can be run at interactive speeds only for small resolutions and trivial
scenes.

Keywords: Programmable Graphics Hardware, Ray Tracing, GPGPU