⚡ Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracer (HWRT)

A high performance, physically based, progressive Path Tracer built from scratch using C++20 and Vulkan

🖼️ Showcase

Amazon Lumberyard Bistro (exterior)

Amazon Lumberyard Bistro (interior)

Crytek Sponza

📈 Visual Comparison & Convergence Metrics

The table below demonstrates the visual and mathematical impact of each sampling technique at 64 samples per pixel (spp) compared to the fully converged ground truth reference.

Metric / Method	Uniform (Naive)	BRDF Importance	Next Event Estimation	Multiple Importance Sampling	Reference
Render Preview
RMSE	0.170272	0.150286	0.011463	0.011457	-
Convergence Boost	1x	1.28x	220.66x	220.88x	-

✨ Features

• Vulkan Ray Tracing Pipeline
• Unidirectional Path Tracing
• Frame Accumulation
• Cook-Torrance BRDF
• Physically Based Materials
• Next Event Estimation
• Multiple Importance Sampling
• glTF 2.0 Scene Loading
• Mesh Instancing
• Procedural Atmosphere
• Shader Hot Reload
• Khronos PBR Neutral Tone mapping
• Anti-Aliasing

🖥️ Requirements

• OS: Windows 10/11 (x64) / Linux (x64)
• GPU: NVIDIA Turing (RTX 20 series) / AMD RDNA 2 (RX 6000 series)
• Vulkan SDK: 1.4
• Compiler: C++20 (GCC, Clang or MinGW)
• CMake: 3.20
• Shader Compiler: The Slang compiler slangc must be on your PATH if you want to use the Reload Shaders feature

⚙️ Build & Run

Clone

git clone --recursive https://github.com/gavrix32/hwrt.git
cd hwrt

# If you cloned without submodules
git submodule update --init --recursive

Linux

# Compile shaders (only needed after editing them)
chmod +x src/shaders/compile.sh
./src/shaders/compile.sh

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build . -j$(nproc)
./hwrt -m ../assets/models/cornell_box.glb

Windows

:: Compile shaders (only needed after editing them)
src\shaders\compile.bat

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build . --config Release
hwrt.exe -m ..\assets\models\cornell_box.glb

📃 License

Copyright © 2026 Dmitry Gavrilov

Distributed under the MIT License.