Ray tracing (graphics) in the context of Polygon (computer graphics)

Radiance is a suite of tools for performing lighting simulation originally written by Greg Ward. It includes a renderer as well as many other tools for measuring the simulated light levels. It uses ray tracing to perform all lighting calculations, accelerated by the use of an octree data structure. It pioneered the concept of high-dynamic-range imaging, where light levels are (theoretically) open-ended values instead of a decimal proportion of a maximum (e.g. 0.0 to 1.0) or integer fraction of a maximum (0 to 255 / 255). It also implements global illumination using the Monte Carlo method to sample light falling on a point.

Greg Ward started developing Radiance in 1985 while at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The source code was distributed under a license forbidding further redistribution. In January 2002 Radiance 3.4 was relicensed under a less restrictive license.

In 3D computer graphics and solid modeling, a polygon mesh is a collection of vertices, edges and faces that defines the shape of a polyhedral object's surface. It simplifies rendering, as in a wire-frame model. The faces usually consist of triangles (triangle mesh), quadrilaterals (quads), or other simple convex polygons (n-gons). A polygonal mesh may also be more generally composed of concave polygons, or even polygons with holes.

The study of polygon meshes is a large sub-field of computer graphics (specifically 3D computer graphics) and geometric modeling. Different representations of polygon meshes are used for different applications and goals. The variety of operations performed on meshes includes Boolean logic (Constructive solid geometry), smoothing, and simplification. Algorithms also exist for ray tracing, collision detection, and rigid-body dynamics with polygon meshes. If the mesh's edges are rendered instead of the faces, then the model becomes a wireframe model.

The PlayStation 5 (PS5) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It was announced as the successor to the PlayStation 4 in April 2019, was launched on November 12, 2020, in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, North America, and South Korea, and was released worldwide a week later. The PS5 is part of the ninth generation of video game consoles, along with Microsoft's Xbox Series X/S consoles, which were released in the same month.

The base model includes an optical disc drive compatible with Ultra HD Blu-ray discs. The Digital Edition lacks this drive, as a lower-cost model for buying games only through download. The two variants were launched simultaneously. Slimmer hardware revisions of both models replaced the original models on sale in November 2023. A PlayStation 5 Pro model was released on November 7, 2024, featuring a faster GPU, improved ray tracing, and introducing an AI-driven upscaling technology.

The Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S are the fourth generation of consoles in Microsoft's Xbox series, succeeding the previous generation's Xbox One. Released on November 10, 2020, the higher-end Series X and lower-end Series S are part of the ninth generation of video game consoles, which also includes Sony's PlayStation 5, released the same month.

Like the Xbox One, the consoles use an AMD 64-bit x86-64 CPU and GPU. Both models have solid-state drives to reduce loading times, support for hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and spatial audio, the ability to convert games to high-dynamic-range rendering using machine learning (Auto HDR), support for HDMI 2.1 variable refresh rate and low-latency modes, and updated controllers. Xbox Series X was designed to nominally render games in 2160p (4K resolution) at 60 frames per second (FPS). The lower-end, digital-only Xbox Series S, which has reduced specifications and does not include an optical drive, was designed to nominally render games in 1440p at 60 FPS, with support for 4K upscaling and ray tracing. Xbox Series X/S are backwards-compatible with nearly all Xbox One-compatible games and accessories (including Xbox 360 and original Xbox games that were made backward-compatible with Xbox One); the newer hardware gives games better performance and visuals. At launch, Microsoft encouraged a "soft" transition between generations, similar to PC gaming, offering the "Smart Delivery" framework to allow publishers to provide upgraded versions of Xbox One titles with optimizations for Xbox Series X/S.

In computer graphics, relief mapping is a texture mapping technique first introduced in 2000 used to render the surface details of three-dimensional objects accurately and efficiently. It can produce accurate depictions of self-occlusion, self-shadowing, and parallax. It is a form of short-distance ray tracing done in a pixel shader. Relief mapping is highly comparable in both function and approach to another displacement texture mapping technique, Parallax occlusion mapping, considering that they both rely on ray tracing, though the two are not to be confused with each other, as parallax occlusion mapping uses reverse heightmap tracing.

The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, most commonly acronymed as POV-Ray, is a cross-platform ray-tracing program that generates images from a text-based scene description. It was originally based on DKBTrace, written by David Kirk Buck and Aaron A. Collins for Amiga computers. There are also influences from the earlier Polyray raytracer because of contributions from its author, Alexander Enzmann. POV-Ray is free and open-source software, with the source code available under the AGPL-3.0-or-later license.

Physically based rendering (PBR) is a computer graphics approach that seeks to render images in a way that models the lights and surfaces with optics in the real world. It is often referred to as "Physically Based Lighting" or "Physically Based Shading". Many PBR pipelines aim to achieve photorealism. Feasible and quick approximations of the bidirectional reflectance distribution function and rendering equation are of mathematical importance in this field. Photogrammetry may be used to help discover and encode accurate optical properties of materials. PBR principles may be implemented in real-time applications using shaders or offline applications using ray tracing or path tracing.

The Radeon RX 6000 series is a series of graphics processing units developed by AMD, based on their RDNA 2 architecture. It was announced on October 28, 2020 and is the successor to the Radeon RX 5000 series. It consists of the entry-level RX 6400, mid-range RX 6500 XT, high-end RX 6600, RX 6600 XT, RX 6650 XT, RX 6700, RX 6700 XT, upper high-end RX 6750 XT, RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and enthusiast RX 6900 XT and RX 6950 XT for desktop computers; and the RX 6600M, RX 6700M, and RX 6800M for laptops. A sub-series for mobile, Radeon RX 6000S (consisting of RX 6600S, RX 6700S, and RX 6800S), was announced in CES 2022, targeting thin and light laptop designs.

The series is designed to compete with Nvidia's GeForce 30 series and Intel's Arc Alchemist series of cards. It is also the first generation of AMD GPUs that supports hardware accelerated real-time ray tracing, variable-rate shading and mesh shaders.

In analytic geometry, a line and a sphere can intersect in three ways:

1. no intersection at all,
2. intersection at exactly one point, and
3. intersection at two points.

Methods for distinguishing these cases, and determining the coordinates for the points in the latter cases, are useful in a number of circumstances. For example, it is a common calculation to perform during ray tracing.