NVScene 2014 Session: A Really Realtime Raytracer (Matt Swoboda)

Realtime renderers find many important visual effects - such as reflections, refractions and global illumination - complicated, slow or impossible because they rely on ray tracing. These effects are necessary to approach the quality of an offline production render. While offline raytracers move to GPU and begin to approach "interactive" performance in the right situation, they are still not truely realtime - coping with ever-changing, moving scenes, lights and cameras, and producing a whole frame at final quality 30 times a second. This talk discusses a GPU raytracer that is focused on realtime applications throughout - the data structures, optimisation for GPU compute, and the tricks and shortcuts used to achieve real time performance and some great visual effects. Matt has a background in graphics programming in both the demoscene and the games industry. He spent 8 years in Sony Computer Entertainment's R&D group researching innovative graphics techniques on games consoles, and worked on every Sony console from Playstation 2 onwards. After moving into the live visuals world, he now works at D3 Technologies and his own production company Run Things. As a part of the legendary demogroup Fairlight he's been responsible for a number of award-winning demoscene productions, and has won more Scene.org awards than anyone else.