ABSTRACT
The surface area heuristic (SAH) is widely used as a predictor for ray tracing performance, and as a heuristic to guide the construction of spatial acceleration structures. We investigate how well SAH actually predicts ray tracing performance of a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH), observe that this relationship is far from perfect, and then propose two new metrics that together with SAH almost completely explain the measured performance. Our observations shed light on the increasingly common situation that a supposedly good tree construction algorithm produces trees that are slower to trace than expected. We also note that the trees constructed using greedy top-down algorithms are consistently faster to trace than SAH indicates and are also more SIMD-friendly than competing approaches.
- Aila, T., and Laine, S. 2009. Understanding the efficiency of ray traversal on gpus. In Proc. High Performance Graphics, 145--149. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aila, T., Laine, S., and Karras, T. 2012. Understanding the efficiency of ray traversal on gpus -- Kepler and Fermi addendum. Tech. Rep. NVR-2012-02, NVIDIA.Google Scholar
- Bittner, J., Hapala, M., and Havran, F. 2013. Fast insertion-based optimization of bounding volume hierarchies. Computer Graphics Forum 32, 1, 85--100.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Feltman, N., Lee, M., and Fatahalian, K. 2012. SRDH: specializing BVH construction and traversal order using representative shadow ray sets. In Proc. High Performance Graphics, 49--55. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Goldsmith, J., and Salmon, J. 1987. Automatic creation of object hierarchies for ray tracing. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 7, 5, 14--20. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Havran, V. 2000. Heuristic Ray Shooting Algorithms. Ph.d. thesis, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague.Google Scholar
- Ize, T., and Hansen, C. 2011. RTSAH traversal order for occlusion rays. Comp. Graph. Forum 30, 2, 297--305.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jakob, W., 2010. Mitsuba renderer. http://www.mitsuba-renderer.org.Google Scholar
- Karras, T., and Aila, T. 2013. Fast parallel construction of high-quality bounding volume hierarchies. In Proc. High-Performance Graphics. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Karras, T. 2012. Maximizing parallelism in the construction of BVHs, octrees, and k-d trees. In Proc. High-Performance Graphics, 33--37. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kensler, A. 2008. Tree rotations for improving bounding volume hierarchies. In Proc. IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 73--76.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Lauterbach, C., Garland, M., Sengupta, S., Luebke, D., and Manocha, D. 2009. Fast BVH construction on GPUs. Computer Graphics Forum 28, 2, 375--384.Google ScholarCross Ref
- MacDonald, D. J., and Booth, K. S. 1990. Heuristics for ray tracing using space subdivision. Vis. Comput. 6, 3, 153--166. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ng, K., and Trifonov, B. 2003. Automatic bounding volume hierarchy generation using stochastic search methods. In Proc. Mini-Workshop on Stochastic Search Algorithms.Google Scholar
- Popov, S., Georgiev, I., Dimov, R., and Slusallek, P. 2009. Object partitioning considered harmful: space subdivision for BVHs. In Proc. High Performance Graphics, 15--22. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Stich, M., Friedrich, H., and Dietrich, A. 2009. Spatial splits in bounding volume hierarchies. In Proc. High-Performance Graphics, 7--13. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Vinkler, M., Havran, V., and Sochor, J. 2012. Visibility driven BVH build up algorithm for ray tracing. Computers & Graphics 36, 4, 283--296. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Walter, B., Bala, K., Kulkarni, M., and Pingali, K. 2008. Fast agglomerative clustering for rendering. In Proc. IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 81--86.Google Scholar
Index Terms
On quality metrics of bounding volume hierarchies
Recommendations
Spatial splits in bounding volume hierarchies
HPG '09: Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics 2009Bounding volume hierarchies (BVH) have become a widely used alternative to kD-trees as the acceleration structure of choice in modern ray tracing systems. However, BVHs adapt poorly to non-uniformly tessellated scenes, which leads to increased ray ...
Fast parallel construction of high-quality bounding volume hierarchies
HPG '13: Proceedings of the 5th High-Performance Graphics ConferenceWe propose a new massively parallel algorithm for constructing high-quality bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) for ray tracing. The algorithm is based on modifying an existing BVH to improve its quality, and executes in linear time at a rate of almost ...
Ray Specialized Contraction on Bounding Volume Hierarchies
In this paper we propose a simple but effective method to modify a BVH based on ray distribution for improved ray tracing performance. Our method starts with an initial BVH generated by any state-of-the-art offline algorithm. Then by traversing a small ...
Comments