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A. Reznicek:
"FPGARay: Accelerating Physically Based Rendering Using FPGAs";
Supervisor: M. Wimmer; Institute of Visual Computing & Human-Centered Technology, 2020; final examination: 2020-06-15.

The synthesis of an image from a scene stored on a computer is called rendering, which is able to deliver photo-realistic results, e.g., by using specific variants of the class of ray tracing algorithms. However, these variants (e.g., path tracing) possess a stochastic characteristic which results in a high computational expense. This is explained by the nature of stochastic algorithms, which use a high number of samples to compute a result-in case of ray tracing, these samples manifest in a high number of rays needed for a complete rendering.
One possibility to accelerate ray tracing-no matter if using a stochastic or simpler variants-is the use of customized hardware. FPGRay is such an approach, which combines the use of customized hardware with the software of an o˙-the-shelf PC to a hybrid solution. This allows increasing the eÿciency by specialized hardware and delivers a sustainability in case of changing algorithms at the same time.
The results point towards a possible eÿciency gain. Unfortunately, in the scope of this thesis this was not realizable and the specific implementation showed a lower eÿciency compared to the software implementation. Nevertheless, the possibility to achieve a higher eÿciency with this approach by indicating FPGRay´s potential could be shown.

https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_292960.pdf