PowerVR OpenRL Ray Tracing

PowerVR OpenRL™ is a flexible low level API, available for download as an SDK for accelerating ray tracing in both graphics and non-graphics (e.g., physics) applications. It is being integrated by a rapidly growing number of developers in rendering applications for a wide range of markets, including film and video, games, architecture, and industrial design.

This cross-OS, cross-platform API is the only ray tracer that takes advantage of multiple heterogeneous compute devices simultaneously. This means that CPUs, OpenCL GPUs, and Imagination’s Caustic ray tracing accelerator cards are fully utilized for the fastestray tracing performance possible. Like OpenGL, OpenRL hides the complexities ofinterfacing with different graphics devices by presenting a single, uniform interface. A free perpetual license of OpenRL is available for integration, with either commercial or non-commercial applications.

OpenGL inspired programming model
This standards based API will already be familiar to OpenGL programmers. Many features of OpenGL systems are also present in the OpenRL SDK, including vertex buffer objects, frame buffer objects, vertex shaders, GLUT, etc.

Transparent acceleration structure
Acceleration structures are data structures used in ray tracing to facilitate fast ray-geometry intersection testing. In OpenRL, acceleration structures are built and maintained transparently, behind the scenes, and this eliminates the need for your application to write any code to create or traverse them. This also allows for hardware acceleration of the accelerationstructure assembly. OpenRL can also leverage the acceleration structure built in previous frames, to optimize the system performance in subsequent frames.

Runtime compilation
OpenRL incorporates an optimizing compiler that compiles all shaders at runtime, producing low-level machine code targeted to the hardware configuration on which your application is running. This means that you don’t need to care about what hardware you are targeting when you are programming with OpenRL. This also means that your application can modify shaders while running, and seamlessly compile them for use in the next frame. This opens up many possibilities for interactivity, by bringing ray tracing into the earliest stages of 3D content creation.

Developer tools
OpenRL comes bundled with everything you need to make great ray traced applications. The stats plotter is a tool for monitoring the statistics of a live running application. This helps the developer better diagnose and optimize their application. The OpenRL profiler allows the developer to examine hot spots within a scene by allowing the ray tree for any pixel to be explored graphically in real-time. Finally, shader builder is an integrated development environment designed to ease the creation of RLSL vertex, ray, and frame shaders.