CGI2014 manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Ray tracing via GPU rasterization

Abstract Ray tracing is a dominant method for gener-ating a wide variety of global illumination effects, such as reflections/refractions, shadows, etc. In this paper, we propose an efficient technique to perform nearly accurate ray tracing using the programmable graphics processor units (GPUs). With the aid of the linked-list A-buffer and the uniform voxel grid to represent scene geometry, the ray-scene intersection can be efficiently computed via the built-in rasterization on GPUs. Based on this novel ray-scene intersection technique, a new ray-tracing framework is introduced and supports var-ious light transport algorithms, including Ray Casting, Whitted Ray-tracing, Ambient Occlusion, Path Trac-ing, and so on. The experimental results demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our approach