Ray Tracing

Overview

This is my take on Peter Shirley's Ray Tracing in One Weekend book.

This project uses JavaScript and is intended to serve as a reference point in the performance comparison (see below).

Build & Run this project

1. Install Node.js

2. Clone the repository

3. Optional: Change sample count in nodejs-js/main.js and nodejs-ts/main.ts

4. Install dependencies

   npm install

5. Run plain JavaScript version (with Node.js):

   npm run nodejs-js

   Run TypeScript version using tsc:

   npm run nodejs-ts-tsc

   Run TypeScript version using tsm:

   npm run nodejs-ts-tsm

   Run TypeScript version using ts-node:

   npm run nodejs-ts-tsnode

Performance

I've already implemented Peter Shirley's ray tracing in various programming languages running on CPU & GPU and compared their performance.

The performance was measured on the same scene (see image above) with the same amount of objects, the same recursive depth, the same resolution (1920 x 1080). The measured times are averaged over multiple runs.

Reference system: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (12 Cores / 24 Threads) | AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

	1 sample / pixel	100 samples / pixel
Elixir	67,200 ms	N/A
JavaScript - Node.js	4,870 ms	308 s
Go	1,410 ms	142 s
OCaml	795 ms	75 s
Java	770 ms	59 s
C++	685 ms	70 s
Rust	362 ms	36 s
C	329 ms	33 s
GPU - Compute Shader	21 ms	2 s
GPU - Vulkan Ray Tracing Extension	1 ms	0.1 s