Just as a followup. I now know of 6 HW-Raytracing projects now: 1. The SaarCOR project that has spawned the InTrace company. They are using a Virtex-II 6000-4 FPGA. They are no interested in Open Source or in cooperations. I have talked to them at the CeBIT '04 and they were quiet secretive about their work. If you look at their latest paper you may also find that a lot of details are missing which therefore make it impossible to easily reproduce their work.
They have developed the "OpenRT" raytracing API (OpenGL-like), however their latest papers say naught about it. I guess their latest work is not yet integrated with OpenRT. URLs: http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~jofis/SaarCOR/DynRT/DynRT.html 2. Sanchez-Elez et al. You can find their '03 paper by googling for "Algorithm Optimizations and Mapping Schemes for Interactive Ray Tracing on a Reconfigurable Architecture", which is the title of their paper. Their seems to be no webpage describing their work (or I have not found it). There is what seems to be a related publication "Efficient mapping of hierarchical trees on coarse-grain reconfigurable architectures" published in '04. URLs: http://www.dacya.ucm.es/marcos/investigacion2.htm 3. Joshua Fender and Jonathan Rose. Their '03 publication's title is "A High-Speed Ray Tracing Engine Built on a Field-Programmable System". The VHDL source code for that has been made available freely (under "circuit benchmark sets"). The VHDL code is hardly documented and was developed for a two-FPGA board called the "Transmogrifier-3". From my short conversation with Mr. Fender I gather that this project is not right now continued. URLs: http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~fender/ 4. James Richard Srinivasan Masters' thesis. His '02 thesis title is "Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracing". He uses the FPGA exclusively for intersection calculations of rays and spheres. His only example is the Sphereflake scene, which is not rendered correctly in hardware (visible errors), an error which he didn't track down (no enough time?). URLs: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/jrs53/super/PartII.html 5. Private project by Bruno Barberi Gnecco. He currently has a purely software-based realtime rendering approach right now, but says that he has been developing a hw-based approach. 6. Private project by Ulf Ochsenfahrt. He has a sw raytracer right now, which he started to translate into hw yesterday. He just needs to figure out how to get that stupid PCI interface (from opencores) to work. ;) There are also a couple of Shading Language based raytracers out there, at least 5-6 projects as well (possibly more). It's easier to get into SL-based rendering because it doesn't need expensive hw-development kits. If anyone is interested in a more detailed list, send me an email. Thanks to Bruno Barberi Gnecco for the pointer to the 4th project (and his own). Cheers, -- Ulf
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