A Benchmark for Animated Ray Tracing

We saw the need for our Benchmark for Animated Ray Tracing (BART) because no benchmark exists in this area and because at least two groups have been ray tracing fairly complex and realistic scenes at interactive speeds - at rates above one frame per second. Another reason is because acceleration data structures for animated ray tracing have not been studied much but probably will be in the future. BART's main contribution is three parametrically animated test scenes that we designed to stress ray-tracing algorithms and a set of reliable performance measurements that let BART users compare the performance of different ray-tracing algorithms. For approximating algorithms (i.e. algorithms that may produce approximate pixel values), we also define how to measure the quality of the approximated images. Our suite of test scenes is thus designed to accurately measure and objectively compare the performance and quality of ray-traced animated scenes.