Architecture Considerations for Tracing Incoherent Rays

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Date
2010
Authors
Aila, Timo
Karras, Tero
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
This paper proposes a massively parallel hardware architecture for efficient tracing of incoherent rays, e.g. for global illumination. The general approach is centered around hierarchical treelet subdivision of the acceleration structure and repeated queueing/postponing of rays to reduce cache pressure. We describe a heuristic algorithm for determining the treelet subdivision, and show that our architecture can reduce the total memory bandwidth requirements by up to 90% in difficult scenes. Furthermore the architecture allows submitting rays in an arbitrary order with practically no performance penalty.We also conclude that scheduling algorithms can have an important effect on results, and that using fixed-size queues is not an appealing design choice. Increased auxiliary traffic, including traversal stacks, is identified as the foremost remaining challenge of this architecture.
Description

        
@inproceedings{
:10.2312/EGGH/HPG10/113-122
,
booktitle = {
High Performance Graphics
},
editor = {
Michael Doggett and Samuli Laine and Warren Hunt
},
title = {{
Architecture Considerations for Tracing Incoherent Rays
}},
author = {
Aila, Timo
 and 
Karras, Tero
},
year = {
2010
},
publisher = {
The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {
2079-8687
},
ISBN = {
978-3-905674-26-2
},
DOI = {
/10.2312/EGGH/HPG10/113-122
}
}
Citation
URI
https://doi.org/10.2312/EGGH/HPG10/113-122
Collections
High-Performance Graphics 2010