Interactive Global Illumination Rendering System On GPU

Recent rapid development of GPGPU programming enables the possibility of porting a variety of rendering algorithms onto GPU. Due to the embarrassing parallel characteristic of ray tracing algorithm, porting ray tracing based Global Illumination rendering algorithms onto GPU may enjoy a boost in performance, thus providing high quality Global Illumination rendering feedback interactively or even in real-time.This dissertation demonstrates a physically based rendering system that fully runs on GPU, which is developed under NVIDIA’s OptiX ray tracing framework. The renderer, called Tracy, adopts similar interface design and software architecture as the popular renders in academic community, PBRT and Mitsuba. Comparing to the two CPU-based Tenderers, Tracy obtains a great speed-up while maintaining high generality and extensibility. For moderately complex scenes, Tracy produces realistic rendering feedback at interactive rate. This dissertation also introduces improvements on some popular rendering algorithms, such as Progressive Photon Mapping and Bidirectional Path Tracing, making them more suitable for GPU implementation.