high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Many real time computer graphics applications strive for realism, though they have difficulty achieving reflections that are fast, respond to scene changes, and work on a variety of surfaces. This thesis explores an alternative to existing techniques for real time reflections. Ray tracing, a slow technique that does well at physically modelling light, is combined with traditional real time graphics techniques in an attempt to combine the physical accuracy of ray tracing with the speed of traditional real time techniques. The work done in this thesis shows that the technique is viable, and offers the ability to trade off the quality of ray traced reflections for performance. By turning down the quality, real time reflections can be achieved that both respond to scene geometry and work on a variety of surfaces.