skip to main content
research-article

Embree: a kernel framework for efficient CPU ray tracing

Published: 27 July 2014 Publication History

Abstract

We describe Embree, an open source ray tracing framework for x86 CPUs. Embree is explicitly designed to achieve high performance in professional rendering environments in which complex geometry and incoherent ray distributions are common. Embree consists of a set of low-level kernels that maximize utilization of modern CPU architectures, and an API which enables these kernels to be used in existing renderers with minimal programmer effort. In this paper, we describe the design goals and software architecture of Embree, and show that for secondary rays in particular, the performance of Embree is competitive with (and often higher than) existing state-of-the-art methods on CPUs and GPUs.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (a143-sidebyside.mp4)

References

[1]
Aila, T., and Laine, S. 2009. Understanding the Efficiency of Ray Traversal on GPUs. In Proceedings of High-Performance Graphics, 145--149.
[2]
Benthin, C., and Wald, I. 2009. Efficient Ray Traced Soft Shadows using Multi-Frusta Tracing. In Proceedings of High-Performance Graphics, 135--144.
[3]
Benthin, C., Wald, I., Woop, S., Ernst, M., and Mark, W. R. 2012. Combining Single and Packet-Ray Tracing for Arbitrary Ray Distributions on the Intel MIC Architecture. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 18, 9, 1438--1448.
[4]
Bigler, J., Stephens, A., and Parker, S. G. 2006. Design for Parallel Interactive Ray Tracing Systems. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 187--196.
[5]
Dammertz, H., Hanika, J., and Keller, A. 2008. Shallow Bounding Volume Hierarchies for Fast SIMD Ray Tracing of Incoherent Rays. In Proceedings of the 19th Eurographics Conference on Rendering, 1225--1234.
[6]
Ernst, M., and Greiner, G. 2008. Multi Bounding Volume Hierarchies. In Proceedings of the IEEE / Eurographics Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 35--40.
[7]
Glassner, A. 1989. An Introduction to Ray Tracing. Morgan Kaufmann.
[8]
Grünschloss, L., Stich, M., Nawaz, S., and Keller, A. 2011. MSBVH: An Efficient Acceleration Data Structure for Ray Traced Motion Blur. In Proceedings of High-Performance Graphics, 65--70.
[9]
Havran, V. 2000. Heuristic Ray Shooting Algorithms. PhD thesis, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague.
[10]
Karras, T., and Aila, T. 2013. Fast Parallel Construction of High-Quality Bounding Volume Hierarchies. In Proceedings of High-Performance Graphics, 89--99.
[11]
Kensler, A., and Shirley, P. 2006. Optimizing Ray-Triangle Intersection via Automated Search. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 33--38.
[12]
Kensler, A. 2008. Tree Rotations for Improving Bounding Volume Hierarchies. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 73--76.
[13]
Laine, S., Karras, T., and Aila, T. 2013. Megakernels Considered Harmful: Wavefront Path Tracing on GPUs. In Proceedings of High-Performance Graphics, 137--143.
[14]
Lauterbach, C., Garland, M., Sengupta, S., Luebke, D., and Manocha, D. 2009. Fast BVH Construction on GPUs. In Computer Graphics Forum: Proceedings of Eurographics, 375--384.
[15]
Parker, S. G., Bigler, J., Dietrich, A., Friedrich, H., Hoberock, J., Luebke, D., McAllister, D., McGuire, M., Morley, K., Robison, A., and Stich, M. 2010. OptiX: A General Purpose Ray Tracing Engine. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 Papers, 66:1--66:13.
[16]
Pharr, M., and Humphreys, G. 2004. Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation. Morgan Kaufman.
[17]
Pharr, M., and Mark, B. 2012. ISPC - A SPMD compiler for high-performance CPU programming. In Proceedings of Innovative Parallel Computing, 1--13.
[18]
Reshetov, A., Soupikov, A., and Hurley, J. 2005. Multi-Level Ray Tracing Algorithm. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Papers, 1176--1185.
[19]
Stich, M., Friedrich, H., and Dietrich, A. 2009. Spatial Splits in Bounding Volume Hierarchies. In Proceedings of High-Performance Graphics, 7--13.
[20]
Wald, I., Benthin, C., and Slusallek, P. 2002. OpenRT - A Flexible and Scalable Rendering Engine for Interactive 3D Graphics. Tech. rep., Saarland University. Available at http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/Publications.
[21]
Wald, I., Benthin, C., and Slusallek, P. 2003. Distributed Interactive Ray Tracing of Dynamic Scenes. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Large-Data Visualization and Graphics, 11--20.
[22]
Wald, I., Benthin, C., and Boulos, S. 2008. Getting Rid of Packets: Efficient SIMD Single-Ray Traversal using Multi-branching BVHs. In Proceedings of the IEEE / Eurographics Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 49--57.
[23]
Wald, I. 2004. Realtime Ray Tracing and Interactive Global Illumination. PhD thesis, Saarland University.
[24]
Wald, I. 2007. On fast Construction of SAH-based Bounding Volume Hierarchies. In Proceedings of the IEEE / Eurographics Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, 33--40.
[25]
Wald, I. 2012. Fast Construction of SAH BVHs on the Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) Architecture. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 18, 1, 47--57.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Near-infrared Photometry of the Moon’s Surface with Passive Radiometry from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA)The Planetary Science Journal10.3847/PSJ/ad44675:5(122)Online publication date: 28-May-2024
  • (2024)Exploring the Limits of Species Identification via a Convolutional Neural Network in a Complex Forest Scene through Simulated Imaging SpectroscopyRemote Sensing10.3390/rs1603049816:3(498)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2024
  • (2024)Image Processing Hardware Acceleration—A Review of Operations Involved and Current Hardware ApproachesJournal of Imaging10.3390/jimaging1012029810:12(298)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Embree: a kernel framework for efficient CPU ray tracing

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
    ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 33, Issue 4
    July 2014
    1366 pages
    ISSN:0730-0301
    EISSN:1557-7368
    DOI:10.1145/2601097
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 27 July 2014
    Published in TOG Volume 33, Issue 4

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. CPU
    2. SIMD
    3. SPMD
    4. coprocessor
    5. ray tracing

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)109
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)11
    Reflects downloads up to 16 Jan 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Near-infrared Photometry of the Moon’s Surface with Passive Radiometry from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA)The Planetary Science Journal10.3847/PSJ/ad44675:5(122)Online publication date: 28-May-2024
    • (2024)Exploring the Limits of Species Identification via a Convolutional Neural Network in a Complex Forest Scene through Simulated Imaging SpectroscopyRemote Sensing10.3390/rs1603049816:3(498)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2024
    • (2024)Image Processing Hardware Acceleration—A Review of Operations Involved and Current Hardware ApproachesJournal of Imaging10.3390/jimaging1012029810:12(298)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
    • (2024)CAD and constructive solid geometry modeling of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment with OpenMCFrontiers in Nuclear Engineering10.3389/fnuen.2024.13854783Online publication date: 9-May-2024
    • (2024)Virtually measuring layered material appearanceJournal of the Optical Society of America A10.1364/JOSAA.51460441:5(959)Online publication date: 25-Apr-2024
    • (2024)Appearance-Preserving Scene Aggregation for Level-of-Detail RenderingACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/370834344:1(1-23)Online publication date: 19-Dec-2024
    • (2024)3D Reconstruction with Fast Dipole SumsACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/368791443:6(1-19)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2024
    • (2024)DGF: A Dense, Hardware-Friendly Geometry Format for Lossily Compressing Meshlets with Arbitrary TopologiesProceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques10.1145/36753837:3(1-17)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2024
    • (2024)HIPRT: A Ray Tracing Framework in HIPProceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques10.1145/36753787:3(1-18)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2024
    • (2024)Vertex Block DescentACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/365817943:4(1-16)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2024
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    Full Access

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media