A recent trend in real-time rendering is the utilization of the new hardware ray tracing capabilities. Often, usage of a distance field representation is proposed as an alternative when hardware ray tracing is deemed too costly, and the two are seen as competing approaches. In this work, we show that both approaches can work together effectively for a single ray query on modern hardware. We choose to use hardware ray tracing where precision is most important, while avoiding its heavy cost by using a distance field when possible. While a simple approach, in our experiments the resulting tracing algorithm overcomes the associated overhead and allows a user-defined middle ground between the performance of distance field traversal and the improved visual quality of hardware ray tracing.

翻译：近年来，实时渲染领域的最新趋势是利用新型硬件光线追踪能力。当硬件光线追踪被认为成本过高时，距离场表示常被提出作为替代方案，两者被视为竞争性方法。本研究表明，在现代硬件上，这两种方法能够针对单次光线查询有效协同工作。我们选择在精度最关键的场景下使用硬件光线追踪，同时通过尽可能采用距离场来规避其高昂成本。虽然这是一个简单的方案，但在实验中，由此生成的追踪算法克服了相关开销，并允许用户在距离场遍历的性能与硬件光线追踪的视觉质量之间自定义平衡点。