go-tracer

A ray tracer written in Go - adapted from Ray Tracing In One Weekend

Goals

• Get better at Go programming
• Learn about the basics of computer graphics (e.g., Tracing, Refraction, Linear Algebra applications)
• Learn about concurrency and using multiple CPU cores for rendering

Features

• Multi-threaded rendering
• Materials (Glass, Metal, etc)
• Unit Tests

Running the Ray Tracer

Setup

1. go install

Running Options

The ray tracer can be run in either single-threaded or multi-threaded mode:

# Run with multi-threading (default)
go run main.go

# Run with single threading
go run main.go -multi=false

Performance

Performance measurements for the sample scene (on average):

• Single-threaded mode: ~38 seconds
• Multi-threaded mode: ~20 seconds

The multi-threaded implementation provides approximately a 47% reduction in rendering time compared to the single-threaded version! (Results may vary based on your CPU, system resources, etc)