4-day Multi-threaded Interactive Ray Tracer
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Kojack
- OGRE Moderator
- Posts: 7157
- Joined: Sun Jan 25, 2004 7:35 am
- Location: Brisbane, Australia
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There's the Saarcor RPU. It's an FPGA which does hardware raytracing.
Using Cuda you can do non triangle stuff on a gpu, but for typical use modern gpus are pretty much triangle based. Shaders can render other shapes, but there's still a triangle there somewhere (even if it's a full screen quad). For example, I wrote a shader which used the sphere equation to render the earth, with different day/night textures (to get city lights) and a rotating cloud layer, but the whole thing was just 2 triangles.
Of course older gpus did things in different ways. The PowerVR could only render csg combinations of infinite planes (with per pixel depth sorting of all intersecting planes for perfect transparency). The Nvidia nv1 chip worked with quadratic texture maps instead of triangles.
Using Cuda you can do non triangle stuff on a gpu, but for typical use modern gpus are pretty much triangle based. Shaders can render other shapes, but there's still a triangle there somewhere (even if it's a full screen quad). For example, I wrote a shader which used the sphere equation to render the earth, with different day/night textures (to get city lights) and a rotating cloud layer, but the whole thing was just 2 triangles.
Of course older gpus did things in different ways. The PowerVR could only render csg combinations of infinite planes (with per pixel depth sorting of all intersecting planes for perfect transparency). The Nvidia nv1 chip worked with quadratic texture maps instead of triangles.