GridRT: A Massively Parallel Architecture for Ray-Tracing Using Uniform Grids

In this paper, we propose an architecture, which we call GridRT, capable of dealing with the main features, such as shadows and reflections effects, of Ray Tracing used for rendering three-dimensional scenes. This architecture achieves an efficient overall performance yet using a simple and compact massively parallel design. The design exploits the usage of Xilinx^® Floating Point Operator IP Core and the spatial data structure of Regular Grids.