Ray Traced Real Time Rendering

CS 599

Hardware ray tracing under Vulkan — bringing the offline estimator onto the GPU, one validated resource at a time.

4 reports, in the order they were written.

  1. 1 First Light Boostrapping Vulkan instance, device and swapchain with a post-process pipeline and unexpected issues from the validation layers 20 September 2026
  2. 2 Scanline Feeding the post-process pass from a rasterisation pipeline, then growing it into a glTF PBR viewer with tone mapping, HDR output and a physical sky 11 October 2026
  3. 3 Ray Casting One ray per pixel through a Vulkan ray tracing pipeline, shading every hit with the same code as the scanline path, plus an any-hit alpha cutout 24 October 2026 Under review
  4. 4 Path Tracing The ray casting loop becomes a Monte-Carlo path tracer with GGX importance sampling, plus explicit light connections to emitting triangles, the sun, the moon and the sky dome, shared with BRDF sampling by multiple importance sampling 6 November 2026 Under review