2008 Volume 1 Pages 1-11
Although ray tracing is the best approach to high-quality image synthesis, much time is required to generate images due to its huge amount of computation. In particular, ray-primitive intersection tests still dominate the execution time required for ray tracing, and faster ray-primitive intersection algorithms are strongly required to interactively generate higher-quality images with more advanced effects. This paper presents a new fast algorithm for the intersection tests that makes a good use of ray and object coherence in ray tracing. The proposed algorithm utilizes the features whereby the rays in a bundle share the same origin and have massive coherence. By reducing the redundant calculations in the innermost intersection tests for the bundles by precomputation and early termination, the proposed algorithm accelerates the intersection tests. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves 1.43 times faster intersection tests compared with Möller's algorithm by exploiting the features of the bundles of rays.
