Show HN: A physically-based GPU ray tracer written in Julia

We ported pbrt-v4 to Julia and built it into a Makie backend. Any Makie plot can now be rendered with physically-based path tracing.

Julia compiles user-defined physics directly into GPU kernels, so anyone can extend the ray tracer with new materials and media - a black hole with gravitational lensing is ~200 lines of Julia.

Runs on AMD, NVIDIA, and CPU via KernelAbstractions.jl, with Metal coming soon.

Demo scenes: github.com/SimonDanisch/RayDemo

198 points simondanisch 8 months ago 92 comments

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton