XFRT Project Home Page

Welcome to the XFRT project. Yes I know this web page isn't much to look at, but I'm currently too busy adding features to XFRT to do this up nice.

What is XFRT? XFRT is intended to be a free (LGPL), high-performance library that is application source-compatible with the OpenRT API.

(This site is "temporary" hosting. If you wish to link to it, please link to http://xfrt.sourceforge.net).

What's wrong with 3d now?

3d rasterization ( the technology behind Direct3D and OpenGL ) grows more inefficient as scene complexity grows. While ray-tracing has a high bar of entry, it grows more efficient as scene complexity grows. Users demand higher-quality real-time 3d animation, and ray-tracing is the only technology poised to deliver the users' demands in the long run.

Why ray tracing?

We are at the dawn of the age of real-time ray-tracing... seriously... Intel says so. Ray tracing is described as an embarrassingly parallel process. Between ATI's Stream Computing and nVidia's Cuda, both major 3d card manufacturers are now making fully programmable, embarassingly-parallel hardware (see also GPGPU, Sh, and Brook ). In a couple years, this hardware will be inside almost every gamer's PC. On top of that, Intel and AMD's market strategies are currently both focused on the same thing: more cores inside a single cpu. That means that our cpus are going to be embarassingly parallel in a few years, too.

Why OpenRT?

The OpenRT API seems to be the most suitable api to design a commercially-via real-time ray-tracing engine upon.

Why XFRT?

The OpenRT engine is not free for anybody to use, so it is difficult for developers to play with and explore real-time ray-tracing. XFRT hopes to fill that gap by providing a truly free implementation of the OpenRT api.

License: XFRT's license is LGPL.

Help Wanted:

• SIMD expert
• Linux developer to build Linux-dependant parts ( shared-object and makefile )
• Web Designer ( I'm not good at makin' 'em purty )

Contact Me: Contact me at this email address and I will give you my real email address:

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IRC: #xfrt on irc.freenode.net

Links (in no particular order):

• Sourceforge Project Page (News will be posted here for now)
• OpenRT API
• OMPF - Real-time raytracing and other subterfuges (check out the forum!)
• RTGames - RayTraced Games
• Ray Tracing News
• Wald's PHD
• Havran's Thesis
• The BIH paper
• KD-tree construction with SAH
• The MLRTA paper
• KD-Tree Acceleration Structures for a GPU Raytracer
• SyN wiki page on ray tracing
• ATI's Stream Computing Presentation
• IEEE Visualization 2004 Tutorial (using GPU's for raytracing, etc)
• Real-Time Rendering (book - not sure if this is about Ray Tracing)

"Benchmark" 3d Data Links:

• Utah 3d Animation Repository
• Stanford 3d Scanning Repository
• Cornell Box