(ACM, 2020) Gruen, Holger; Benthin, Carsten; Woop, Sven; Yuksel, Cem and Membarth, Richard and Zordan, Victor
We propose an easy and simple-to-integrate approach to accelerate ray tracing of alpha-tested transparent geometry with a focus on Microsoft® DirectX® or Vulkan® ray tracing extensions. Pre-computed bit masks are used to quickly determine fully transparent and fully opaque regions of triangles thereby skipping the more expensive alpha-test operation. These bit masks allow us to skip up to 86% of all transparency tests, yielding up to 40% speed up in a proof-of-concept DirectX® software only implementation.