A Programmable Ray Processing Unit for Realtime Ray Tracing

for accurately computing global light transport and rendering high
quality images.  While recent algorithmic improvements and optimized
parallel software implementations have increased ray tracing
performance to realtime levels, no compact and programmable hardware
solution has been available yet.
This talk describes the architecture and a prototype implementation
of a single chip, fully programmable Ray Processing Unit (RPU). It
combines the flexibility of general purpose CPUs with the efficiency
of current GPUs for data parallel computations. This design allows
or realtime ray tracing of dynamic scenes with programmable
material, geometry, and illumination shaders.
Although, running at only 66 MHz the prototype FPGA implementation
already renders images at up to 20 frames per second, which in many
cases beats the performance of highly optimized software running on
multi-GHz desktop CPUs.