GPU Path Tracer

A real-time path tracer written in Rust with wgpu (GPU) and winit (windowing), featuring data-driven scenes, endless procedurally-generated streaming worlds, and a generative ambient soundtrack (FunDSP + cpal).

Prerequisites

• Rust (stable) — install via rustup.
• A GPU with Vulkan/Metal/DX12 support and up-to-date drivers (wgpu).
• The system libraries below.

System libraries

Library	Why	Needed at
ALSA dev headers	cpal audio output (links alsa-sys)	build time (Linux)
Vulkan loader + GPU driver	wgpu rendering backend	run time (Linux)
Wayland or X11 session	winit window	run time (Linux)

On macOS/Windows no extra system libraries are required — wgpu uses Metal/DX12 and cpal uses CoreAudio/WASAPI out of the box.

Install (Linux)

# Fedora / RHEL
sudo dnf install alsa-lib-devel vulkan-loader mesa-vulkan-drivers

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install libasound2-dev libvulkan1 mesa-vulkan-drivers

# Arch
sudo pacman -S alsa-lib vulkan-icd-loader mesa

The ALSA development headers (alsa-lib-devel / libasound2-dev / alsa-lib) are the one strict build-time requirement added by the audio feature — without them the alsa-sys build script fails. If you have no audio device, the app still runs and just prints audio disabled: ….

Building & running

cargo run --release   # optimized; recommended (path tracing is heavy)
cargo run             # debug build (slow render)
cargo test            # run the unit tests

Running in the browser (WebGPU)

The renderer also runs on the web via WebGPU. Because it relies on storage buffers, there is no WebGL2 fallback — you need a WebGPU-capable browser (Chrome/Edge stable, Safari 18+, or Firefox Nightly).

rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
cargo install --locked trunk        # one-time; bundles wasm-bindgen
trunk serve                         # then open http://127.0.0.1:8080
trunk build                         # or produce a static bundle in dist/

Audio and screenshots are native-only for now; everything else (rendering, the egui panel, scene switching, camera controls) works in the browser. Scenes are embedded into the binary at build time (build.rs), so the scenes/ directory is only needed for native hot-reload (R).

Controls

Input	Action
← / →	Switch between scenes / worlds
W / S	Fly forward / backward
A / D	Strafe left / right
Left-drag	Look around
Right-drag	Pan
Scroll	Zoom
↑ / ↓	Adjust field of view
F	Toggle auto-drift (hands-off forward walk)
P	Toggle camera path playback (static scenes)
R	Hot-reload the current scene/world .ron

Static scenes live in scenes/*.ron; the procedural worlds are the World(( .. )) files (scenes/10_world_* … 13_world_*). See AGENTS.md for architecture details.