Adaptive Raytracing Implementation Using Partial Dynamic Reconfiguration

The continuous strive for improvements in visual realism is progressively increasing the complexity of algorithms for simulating light physics to produce very realistic scenes. As a result, they are becoming more and more suitable for hardware acceleration, even if they introduce new challenges due to the high requirements in terms of resources. In this paper we propose a hardware implementation of the raytracing algorithm, which is a method for rendering 3D scenes. We exploit partial dynamic reconfiguration to adapt the hardware to the specific part of the image under analysis. This allows us to obtain up to 30% better performance with respect to the software baseline implementation on the AVNET ZedBoard platform.