History
Further information: Rendering, Chronology of important published ideasThe rendering equation and its use in computer graphics was presented by James Kajiya in 1986. Path Tracing was introduced then as an algorithm to find a numerical solution to the integral of the rendering equation. A decade later, Lafortune suggested many refinements, including bidirectional path tracing.
Metropolis light transport, a method of perturbing previously found paths in order to increase performance for difficult scenes, was introduced in 1997 by Eric Veach and Leonidas J. Guibas.
More recently, CPUs and GPUs have become powerful enough to render images more quickly, causing more widespread interest in path tracing algorithms. Tim Purcell first presented a global illumination algorithm running on a GPU in 2002. In February 2009 Austin Robison of Nvidia demonstrated the first commercial implementation of a path tracer running on a GPU, and other implementations have followed, such as that of Vladimir Koylazov in August 2009. This was aided by the maturing of GPGPU programming toolkits such as CUDA and OpenCL and GPU ray tracing SDKs such as OptiX.
Read more about this topic: Path Tracing
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)