Ray Tracer

A simple ray tracer following the amazing tutorial by Peter Shirley et al. "Ray Tracing in One Weekend". Implementation is done in Rust.

Examples

Runtime Performance

Rendering the final scene (1200x675 image with 500 samples per pixel and 50 max depth) on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU and 16GB of RAM:

Implementation	Time
Rust (multi-threaded)	2min 21sec
Rust (single-threaded)	16min 53sec
C++ (single-threaded)	27min 31sec

• Multi-threading in Rust is done through Rayon, which shows an excellent scaling on an 8-core CPU. The current code is multi-threaded, and the single-threaded code can be obtained by changing into_par_iter to into_iter and ParallelProgressIterator to ProgressIterator inside camera.rs.
• The C++ is the reference implementation complied with GCC 11.4 (which was ~10% faster than the code complied with Clang 14). This implementation prioritizes simplicity and having fewer dependencies over performance.
• A notable difference between the implementations is that the C++ one uses float64 while I use float32 in Rust. Further, the C++ implementation allows the same material to be referenced by more than one object in the scene.