And we are back...

It has been far too long since my last post here. I guess regular blogging and regular exercise are equally hard :)

But I have not gone into torpor for the last few months. We ported our raytracer to CUDA this October, and development on that is still going on. Visit my website for the updates on that.

What still remains is a lot of code cleanup, optimizations and a few more features to add. Without wasting too much space, here is a brief overview of everything:

Raytracing with reflection, refraction, phong shading and shadows.
Scenes are point models (points are represented as oriented disks/splats).
An Octree is constructed on the CPU and uploaded as a linear texture onto the GPU.
Each GPU thread handles a single eye ray (along with all the bounces and shadow rays)

Performance:
On scenes of about 1-4 million points, we have a preprocessing time of around 1-2 minutes.
Raytracing at 512x512 for only primary rays + phong shading ~ 100-150 fps
Raytracing at 512x512 for average 5 bounces with shadows from one light source ~ 20 fps
Raytracing at 1024x1024 with 4 shadowcasting light sources and avg 3 bounces ~ 3-4 fps

All numbers are reported for a GTX 275.