Welcome, to start off I will tell you a little bit about what I intend to accomplish through my research.

My goal is to use old knowledge and new technology to develop a fast and beautiful ray-tracing engine that runs at frame rates high enough that it can be used for interactive applications.

The key point here being that I will be maintaining "cheap" equipment that is easily accessible to the public and reasonable as a home PC. Please see my equipment specification page.

I am going to start out with a simple ray-tracer with basic ray-tracing functionality (the old knowledge). Then I plan to incorporate the CUDA SDK to make the ray-tracing heavily multi-threaded on a Nvidia GTX 280 video card (the new technology).

The biggest problem I believe that I will face during my research is basically a lack of speed. Though the new GTX 280 GPU is impressively fast, its not going to be fast enough for decent realtime ray-tracing (see Nvidia's Realtime Ray-tracing for an idea of what I mean). I have a few ideas for battling this problem.

1. Faster hardware! (again, check out my equipment specification page)
2. A rasterization and ray-tracing hybrid.
3. Using openGL as a base and then creating my own form of "shading" using ray-tracing.

All of which I will further explain throughout my progress.
Please check out my blog to see such progress, I will update it with every new step.

 

For further information on the interactive realtime ray-tracing world, check out my iRTRT.com/blog for news on other developing realtime ray-tracing projects.

Also, for the time being everything on this site is free, and I will post a lot of my findings. I will not, however, be putting any of my source on here. I encourage others that are interested in working with iRTRT to feel free to use any of my techniques and information. All I ask is two things please give iRTRT.org mention in your work, and contact me with information about your work for I am very interested in what others are working on in the iRTRT world. That way I can also give your work a mention on iRTRT.com.