Adventures in CUDA Path Tracing: Part 2

This is really just teaser post for my next update. I’ve not done much on traversal yet (hence the world of spheres), but I’ve made some progress on shading. Here’s a screenshot of a pure CUDA renderer left for 20 seconds or so to get a nice smooth result:

This scene contains a few BSDFs:

• Lambertian (the cyan, magenta and “wall” spheres)
• Perfect specular (the mirror sphere)
• Fresnel dielectric (the glass sphere)
• Blinn microfacet (the “floor” sphere)

Everything uses importance sampling to reduce variance, which lets caustics converge quite quickly even on glossy surfaces like the one shown here. I’m preparing a post to go into more details of the rendering algorithm, which is a type of path tracing that I think works quite well on the GPU...