Improving the Performance of a Ray Tracing Algorithm Using a GPU

This article presents the application of parallel computing techniques using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)in order to improve the computational efficiency of a ray tracing algorithm. Three different GPU implementations of the ray tracing algorithm are presented. The experimental evaluation of the proposed methods demonstrates that a significant reduction of the computing time can be obtained when compared with a CPU implementation, making a step forward to the real-time calculation of scene brightness on desktop computers.