Dependency Graph Scheduling in a Volumetric Ray Tracing Architecture

Frank, S.; Kaufman, A.

Dependency Graph Scheduling in a Volumetric Ray Tracing Architecture

Date

2002

Authors

Frank, S.
Kaufman, A.

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

We propose a volumetric ray tracing PCI board which uses FPGA components and on chip memory. In a multiboard system a super volume (i.e., one that is larger than on-board memory) can be either distributed or shared. In a single board system it must be fetched from main memory as needed. In any case the volume is sub-divided into cubic cells and process scheduling has a major impact on the rendering time. There is not generally a scheduling order which would allow each sub-volume to be read from memory only once. We introduce instead a new, compact representation of the cell ray-spawning dependencies of all rays, called Cell Tree. We use this Cell Tree to determine a good processing schedule for the next frame based on the ray dependencies from the previous frame. Experimental results show an average miss reduction of 30%. The main contribution of this paper is the generation of a Cell Tree for ray tracing which collects coherent bundles of rays with very little overhead. This is used to decrease overall memory access in sequences where there is good inter-frame coherence.

        @inproceedings{:10.2312/EGGH/EGGH02/127-135
,
booktitle = {SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware
},
editor = {Thomas Ertl and Wolfgang Heidrich and Michael Doggett
},
title = {{Dependency Graph Scheduling in a Volumetric Ray Tracing Architecture
}},
author = {Frank, S. and 
Kaufman, A.
},
year = {2002
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-3471
},
ISBN = {1-58113-580-1
},
DOI = {/10.2312/EGGH/EGGH02/127-135
}
}

URI

https://doi.org/10.2312/EGGH/EGGH02/127-135

Collections

EGGH02: SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware 2002

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