This was our Final-year Design Project (Capstone) at the University of Toronto Electrical and Computer Engineering department.
The project is a ray-tracing core that can be deployed on an FPGA.
- Ray-tracing is a widely-used algorithm in computer graphics to create realistic 3D images and animations. Variations of it are used extensively by companies like Pixar and Dreamworks. It is typically very computationally intensive.
- FPGAs are devices that can offer significant advantages in performance over traditional devices (CPUs/GPUs), due to their lower latency and higher power efficiency. They're used in High Frequency Trading to make faster investment decisions, and Microsoft uses them to accelerate AI (Project Brainwave) and Azure.
Image of a jeep rendered by our FPGA core (11094 triangles, 5913 vertices)
Follow README instructions for the NewFPGA, NewHPS, and host repos.
Once done, you can trigger a render using our command-line tool.
We designed this for the DE1-SoC board, but it probably works on a DE10 as well.