Interactive rendering
systems provide a powerful way to convey
information, especially for complex environments.
Until recently the only interactive rendering
algorithms were hardware-accelerated polygonal
renderers. This approach has limitations due to
both the algorithms used and the tight coupling to
the hardware. Software-only implementations are
more easily modified and extended which enables
experimentation with various rendering and
interaction options.
The real-time ray tracer (rtrt) is an
interactive ray tracing system designed for current
multiprocessor machines. This system was initially
developed to examine ray tracing's performance on a
modern architecture. We were surprised at just how
responsive the resulting system turned out to
be. Although the system takes careful advantage of
system resources, it is essentially a brute force
implementation. We intentionally take the simple
path at each step believing that neither
simplifying assumptions nor complex algorithms are
needed for performance.
The ray tracing system is interactive in part
because it runs on a high-end machine (SGI Origin
2000) with fast frame buffer, CPU set, and
interconnect.