Tauray: A Scalable Real-Time Open-Source Path Tracer for Stereo and Light Field Displays

Abstract

Light field displays represent yet another step in continually increasing pixel counts. Rendering realistic real-time 3D content for them with ray tracing-based methods is a major challenge even accounting for recent hardware acceleration features, as renderers have to scale to tens to hundreds of distinct viewpoints.<br/><br/>To this end, we contribute an open-source, cross-platform real-time 3D renderer called Tauray. The primary focus of Tauray is in using photorealistic path tracing techniques to generate real-time content for multi-view displays, such as VR headsets and light field displays; this aspect is generally overlooked in existing renderers. Ray tracing hardware acceleration as well as multi-GPU rendering is supported. We compare Tauray to other open source real-time path tracers, like Lighthouse 2, and show that it can meet or significantly exceed their performance.