Realtime Raytracer

My good friend Martin came up with the idea to implement software rendering techniques. Over the last decade, this topic was more and more unimportant because of the rapid development of hardware accelerated graphic cards. But lately, PCs get multiple CPU cores as well and software rendering might replace hardware rendering in the long run. After all, when your computer has 1024 cores, why add 256 specialized cores for graphics?

We discuss our progress in this thread.

I decided to implemented a simple raytracer because

• I haven't done it before
• I used newton game dynamics for some other projects a bit and realized that it's scene management could be easily abused for raycasting through the scene.

Here are the results so far (click for more pictures):


spheres rendering



rendering a simple model using newton's trianglemeshcollision


They don't look as pretty as other raytracer pictures you can find online, but it's realtime-ish: I get about 3-4 fps with one thread on my Q6600 - I haven't multithreaded it.

Download the current version: Raytracer3.7z Raytracer3src.7z

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