Ray tracing tutorial on GLSL?

Question

I haven't found a good ray tracing tutorial on GLSL, I found one on CUDA that's great, but I really want a GLSL one too. I read the Stanford Graphics paper on GPU ray tracing and I want to see a GLSL implementation.

see [Reflection and refraction impossible without recursive ray tracing?](https://stackoverflow.com/a/45140313/2521214) — Spektre, Sep 19 '17 at 13:17

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 18 '11 at 04:02

Shading languages really aren't meant for raytracing. The structure of a rasterizer just doesn't make them a good fit for most raytracing tasks. Yes, raytracers can use rasterizers to do parallel ray computations, and that's good. But the bulk of the algorithm doesn't fit the needs of a rasterizer.

Indeed, now that there are GP-GPU specific languages like OpenCL and CUDA, most of the research time and money is invested in them, not in shoehorning GP-GPU functionality into a rasterizer. It just isn't worth the effort to work around the limitations of a rasterizing pipeline to do raytracing; you'll get better performance with a real GP-GPU language.

And isn't performance the whole reason to do GP-GPU to begin with?

GLSL Is used to compute ray tracing. Thats the fact. – Alexander Sobolev Jan 10 '14 at 22:58 — Alexander Sobolev, Jan 10 '14 at 22:58

Ray tracing tutorial on GLSL?

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