Approximate Ray-Tracing on the GPU with Distance Impostors

In order to realize global effects such as reflections or refractions, ray-tracing is a perfectly suitable algorithm. While ray-tracing is a very simple algorithm ("shoot a ray"), it is computationally very expensive. However, for many real-time applications an approximate rather than a precise ray-triangle intersection is considered to be sufficient. Distance Impostors are such an approximate method, which can be efficiently implemented on the GPU. The goal of this thesis is to implement a version of Distance Impostors and compare its quality and performance against the ray-tracing ground truth.

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