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A detailed study of ray tracing performance: render time and energy cost

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Abstract

Optimizations for ray tracing have typically focused on decreasing the time taken to render each frame. However, in modern computer systems it may actually be more important to minimize the energy used, or some combination of energy and render time. Understanding the time and energy costs per ray can enable the user to make conscious trade-offs between image quality and time/energy budget in a complete system. To facilitate this, in this paper we present a detailed study of per-ray time and energy costs for ray tracing. Specifically, we use path tracing, broken down into distinct kernels, to carry out an extensive study of the fine-grained contributions in time and energy for each ray over multiple bounces. As expected, we have observed that both the time and energy costs are highly correlated with data movement. Especially in large scenes that do not mostly fit in on-chip caches, accesses to DRAM not only account for the majority of the energy use, but also the corresponding stalls dominate the render time.

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Acknowledgements

Crytek Sponza is from Frank Meinl at Crytek and Marko Dabrovic, Dragon is from the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory, Hairball is from Samuli Laine, and San Miguel is from Guillermo Leal Laguno.

Funding This material is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1409129.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Utah, 50 Central Campus Dr, Sale Lake City, UT, 84112, USA

    Elena Vasiou, Konstantin Shkurko, Ian Mallett, Erik Brunvand & Cem Yuksel

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  1. Elena Vasiou
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  2. Konstantin Shkurko
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  3. Ian Mallett
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  4. Erik Brunvand
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Correspondence to Elena Vasiou.

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The authors, Elena Vasiou, Konstantin Shkurko, Ian Mallett, Erik Brunvand, and Cem Yuksel, declare that they have no conflict of interest relating to this work and publication.

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Vasiou, E., Shkurko, K., Mallett, I. et al. A detailed study of ray tracing performance: render time and energy cost. Vis Comput 34, 875–885 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-018-1532-8

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