Ray Tracing#

Overview#

Ray Tracing defines a set of ray tracing and high-fidelity rendering and computation routines for use in a wide variety of 3D graphics uses including, film and television photorealistic visual effects and animation rendering, scientific visualization, high-performance computing computations, gaming, and more. Ray Tracing is designed to allow cooperative execution on a wide variety of computational devices: CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators, termed “XPU” computation. The functionality is subdivided into several domains: geometric ray tracing computations, volumetric computation and rendering, path guided ray tracing, image denoising, and an integrated rendering infrastructure and API utilizing all the individual kernel capabilities integrated into a highly capable, easy to use rendering engine.

The individual components and their APIs are described. Other design considerations and related components that are not necessarily part of the Ray Tracing specification but that are worth mentioning will be discussed in the appendix.