TwentyFiveSoftware / ocaml-ray-tracing

OCaml implementation of Peter Shirley's Ray Tracing in One Weekend book.

Ray Tracing

Overview

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

This project uses the OCaml programming language, which is a general-purpose, functional programming language.

Build & Run this project

1. Install OCaml (including the opam package manager)
2. Switch to a OCaml version that has the flambda compiler enabled (the ocaml-option-flambda option) Check the releases page for the newest verson

   opam switch create flambda ocaml-variants.5.1.0+options ocaml-option-flambda

3. Clone the repository
4. Optional: Change sample and thread count in bin/ray_tracing.ml
5. Install dependencies

   opam install . --deps-only

6. Build the project

   dune build --release

7. Run the executable

    ./bin/ray_tracing.exe

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