Research of Ray Tracing Accelerated by modern Graphics Hardware.

Recent advances in consumer graphics hardware have made significant progress. Fixed function graphics chips have been replaced with programmable graphics processors. New flexibilty in graphics hardware has opened a new field of research. There is possibility to port here the techniques graphics chips were not primarily designed for. The main motivation is to use the horsepower of GPU and decrease the CPU load. The thesis will investigate how to port ray tracing method onto modern graphics hardware. This approach is non-trivial beacause of resource and progammabilty limitations of today's graphics hardware.

The thesis will describe historical development of graphics hardware, mapping fundamental hardware features to leading graphics APIs (OpenGL), investigation and design of implementation of ray tracing in modern graphics hardware and a test implementation with focus on use in a game engine.