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Efficient incoherent ray traversal on GPUs through compressed wide BVHs

Published: 28 July 2017 Publication History

Abstract

We present a GPU-based ray traversal algorithm that operates on compressed wide BVHs and maintains the traversal stack in a compressed format. Our method reduces the amount of memory traffic significantly, which translates to 1.9--2.1× improvement in incoherent ray traversal performance compared to the current state of the art. Furthermore, the memory consumption of our hierarchy is 35--60% of a typical uncompressed BVH.
In addition, we present an algorithmically efficient method for converting a binary BVH into a wide BVH in a SAH-optimal fashion, and an improved method for ordering the child nodes at build time for the purposes of octant-aware fixed-order traversal.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      HPG '17: Proceedings of High Performance Graphics
      July 2017
      180 pages
      ISBN:9781450351010
      DOI:10.1145/3105762
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      Published: 28 July 2017

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      Author Tags

      1. GPU
      2. acceleration structures
      3. ray tracing

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      HPG '17: High-Performance Graphics
      July 28 - 30, 2017
      California, Los Angeles

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