Justification

This section justifies the choice of Ray Tracing as the rendering technique under evaluation by referencing established systems and scientific literature that utilize the same technique.

Examples of Other Systems Using Ray Tracing

NVIDIA RTX™ SeriesNVIDIA’s RTX GPUs leverage hardware-accelerated ray tracing (RT Cores) to deliver real‑time ray‑traced shadows, reflections, and global illumination in modern games such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Minecraft RTX. This demonstrates that ray tracing has matured to a production‑ready, high‑performance solution on contemporary hardware.

Unreal Engine 5 (Lumen)Unreal Engine’s Lumen global illumination system uses software and hardware ray tracing to provide fully dynamic indirect lighting. Lumen is a flagship example of a commercial game engine embracing ray tracing for realistic lighting effects.

Unity High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP)Unity’s HDRP offers optional ray‑traced reflections and ambient occlusion pipelines. These features are configurable per-camera and per-material, illustrating how industry‑grade engines integrate ray tracing for high‑fidelity graphics.

Pixar’s RenderManRenderMan’s RIS (RenderMan Integrator System) employs ray tracing for photo‑realistic offline rendering in film production. RenderMan’s success in movies like Toy Story 4 and Turning Red underscores ray tracing’s role in achieving cinematic quality.

Scientific Source

Pharr, Matt, Wenzel Jakob, and Greg Humphreys. Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation (3rd Edition). Morgan Kaufmann, 2016. This seminal textbook describes the mathematical foundations of ray tracing, its algorithms for acceleration structures (BVH, KD‑trees), and Monte Carlo sampling methods, forming the academic backbone for modern path tracers.

Contextual Justification

Why Ray Tracing?

Provides physically accurate lighting (reflections, refractions, soft shadows, global illumination) in a single unified framework.

Scales elegantly with scene complexity through acceleration structures.

Supported by both hardware (RTX) and software (offline renderers), proving its flexibility and robustness.

Relation to Evaluation

By comparing a custom GPU ray tracer to Unity’s built-in renderer, this study examines real‑time feasibility and performance trade‑offs of ray tracing—a technique already adopted by leading graphics hardware and engines, thereby validating its relevance and timeliness for advanced rendering applications.