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Hardware-Accelerated Dual-Split Trees

Published: 26 August 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Bounding volume hierarchies (BVH) are the most widely used acceleration structures for ray tracing due to their high construction and traversal performance. However, the bounding planes shared between parent and children bounding boxes is an inherent storage redundancy that limits further improvement in performance due to the memory cost of reading these redundant planes. Dual-split trees can create identical space partitioning as BVHs, but in a compact form using less memory by eliminating the redundancies of the BVH structure representation. This reduction in memory storage and data movement translates to faster ray traversal and better energy efficiency. Yet, the performance benefits of dual-split trees are undermined by the processing required to extract the necessary information from their compact representation. This involves bit manipulations and branching instructions which are inefficient in software. We introduce hardware acceleration for dual-split trees and show that the performance advantages over BVHs are emphasized in a hardware ray tracing context that can take advantage of such acceleration. We provide details on how the operations needed for decoding dual-split tree nodes can be implemented in hardware and present experiments in a number of scenes with different sizes using path tracing. In our experiments, we have observed up to 31% reduction in render time and 38% energy saving using dual-split trees as compared to binary BVHs representing identical space partitioning.

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References

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques  Volume 3, Issue 2
August 2020
218 pages
EISSN:2577-6193
DOI:10.1145/3420254
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 the author(s) 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].

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Publication History

Published: 26 August 2020
Published in PACMCGIT Volume 3, Issue 2

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  • (2022)Real-Time Rendering of Point Clouds With Photorealistic Effects: A SurveyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2022.314676810(13151-13173)Online publication date: 2022
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