ART (Accelerated Raytracing Testbed)

ART is a ray tracing testbed designed to benchmark and compare different spatial acceleration structures used in CPU ray tracing.

It features a full GUI for ease of use.

Key features

• Path tracing renderer
• Uniform grid acceleration structure
• Hierarchical uniform grid acceleration structure
• Octree acceleration structure
• BSP tree acceleration structure
• k-d tree acceleration structure
• Bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) acceleration structure
• Basic time-based performance benchmarking

Future work

• Comprehensive performance benchmarking
• Wide range of varied test scenarios

System requirements

Linux and Windows are actively supported. This is a C++17 project; it is untested with older C++ standards and may not compile.

Dependencies

Most dependencies are bundled in the external/ directory:

• Catch2 - Header-only C++ testing framework
• imgui - Immediate mode GUI library (GUI builds only)
• SDL3 - Cross-platform multimedia library (GUI builds only)
  • Windows: Bundled in external/SDL3/
  • Linux: Install via package manager (e.g., sudo apt install libsdl3-dev or equivalent)
• stb_image, stb_image_write - Single-header image I/O libraries

Building

Build configurations

The project supports three build modes:

• GUI - Interactive graphical interface using SDL3 and imgui
• Headless - Command-line only, no GUI dependencies required
• Test - Command-line only, unit test suite

Linux

./build.sh                      # Debug Headless build (default)
./build.sh debug                # Debug Headless build
./build.sh debug_gui            # Debug GUI build
./build.sh release              # Release Headless build
./build.sh release_gui          # Release GUI build
./build.sh test                 # Build test suite

Windows

./generate_vs2022_solution.bat

Then open the generated solution and select the desired configuration:

• Debug_GUI
• Debug_Headless
• Release_GUI
• Release_Headless
• Test

Output locations

• bin/Debug_Headless/ART - Debug headless executable
• bin/Debug_GUI/ART - Debug GUI executable
• bin/Release_Headless/ART - Optimized headless executable
• bin/Release_GUI/ART - Optimized GUI executable
• bin/Test/ART - Test suite executable

Runtime dependencies (Linux)

On Linux, GUI executables require the SDL3 shared library to be installed. Install it via your package manager before running GUI builds:

• Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt install libsdl3
• Fedora: sudo dnf install SDL3

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/miarolfe/accelerated-raytracing-testbed
cd accelerated-raytracing-testbed
./build.sh release      # Linux - use "generate_vs2022_solution.bat" on Windows
./bin/Release_Headless/ART

Testing

Running tests

./build.sh test         # Build test configuration
./bin/Test/ART          # Run test suite

Continuous integration

GitHub Actions automatically runs tests on every push and pull request to the main branch. Tests execute on ubuntu-latest and windows-latest. Check the Actions tab for build logs and test results.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Third-party licenses

• Catch2 - Boost Software License 1.0 (see external/Catch2/)
• imgui - MIT License (see external/imgui/)
• SDL3 - zlib License (see external/SDL3/)
• stb_image, stb_image_write - Public domain / MIT (see headers in external/stb/)

Acknowledgments

• Catch2 - C++ testing framework
• imgui - Immediate mode graphical user interface
• SDL3 - Platform abstraction layer
• stb_image, stb_image_write - Public domain image single-header libraries (stb_image, stb_image_write)
• This project, and my interest in ray tracing, were heavily inspired by the "Ray Tracing in One Weekend" series. Check them out!

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