Abyss

Real-time black hole renderer using GPU-accelerated ray tracing through curved spacetime.

Traces photon geodesics in the Schwarzschild metric to visualize gravitational lensing, the photon sphere, Einstein rings, and accretion disk emission. Built with CUDA/OpenGL interop. CUDA computes the physics, OpenGL displays the result.

Schwarzschild Model

Stack

• C++ / CUDA — geodesic integration via RK4
• OpenGL 4.5 — fullscreen quad display
• GLFW / GLAD — windowing and GL loading
• CMake — build system

Build

Requires: CUDA Toolkit, Visual Studio 2022 (MSVC), vcpkg with glfw3:x64-windows.

Build using CMake

Use the following command to execute and your machine will start roleplaying as a jet taking off while you're mesmerized by the black hole.

./build/Debug/blackhole-sim.exe

Architecture

src/
├── main.cpp              # Window, GL context, render loop
├── cuda_interop.cu/.h    # CUDA-GL texture bridge, camera setup
├── render_kernel.cu       # Per-pixel kernel dispatch
├── camera.cuh             # Ray generation, float3 math helpers
└── metrics/
    ├── metric.cuh         # Shared types (TraceResult, GeodesicState)
    └── schwarzschild.cuh  # Geodesic acceleration + RK4 integration

Metrics are modular — swap schwarzschild::trace() for kerr::trace() to render a rotating black hole. Camera, interop, and GL code stay untouched.

Roadmap

• CUDA-GL interop pipeline
• Schwarzschild geodesic ray tracer
• Rotating black holes
• Charged black holes
• Generalized blackhole simulation framework