knightcrawler25/GLSL-PathTracer

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2056 stars · 198 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A toy physically based GPU path tracer written in C++ that runs its rendering loop in GLSL fragment shaders via OpenGL. It supports features like Disney BSDF, two-level BVH instancing, image-based lighting, multiple importance sampling, and OpenImageDenoise.

Use cases

• render physically based images on the gpu
• learn how a path tracer works
• experiment with disney bsdf materials
• render gltf scenes with global illumination
• study bvh construction and instancing
• prototype shader-based ray tracing techniques

When to choose

• you want a small, readable codebase to learn GPU path tracing
• you need a lightweight renderer for gltf/magicaVoxel-style scenes
• you want to experiment with shader-based rendering techniques

When to avoid

• you need a production-grade renderer with a full feature set
• you require CPU rendering or multi-threaded offline rendering
• you need extensive format support or a polished artist workflow

Facets

application · maturity maintenance

graphics simulation image-processing graphics computer-vision developer-tools windows cpp path-tracing glsl opengl ray-tracing bvh disney-bsdf gltf rendering physically-based-rendering linux gpu

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="knightcrawler25/GLSL-PathTracer")