KD-Tree Acceleration Structures for a GPU Raytracer

Foley, Tim; Sugerman, Jeremy

KD-Tree Acceleration Structures for a GPU Raytracer

Date

2005

Authors

Foley, Tim
Sugerman, Jeremy

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

Modern graphics hardware architectures excel at compute-intensive tasks such as ray-triangle intersection, making them attractive target platforms for raytracing. To date, most GPU-based raytracers have relied upon uniform grid acceleration structures. In contrast, the kd-tree has gained widespread use in CPU-based raytracers and is regarded as the best general-purpose acceleration structure.We demonstrate two kd-tree traversal algorithms suitable for GPU implementation and integrate them into a streaming raytracer. We show that for scenes with many objects at different scales, our kd-tree algorithms are up to 8 times faster than a uniform grid. In addition, we identify load balancing and input data recirculation as two fundamental sources of inefficiency when raytracing on current graphics hardware.

        @inproceedings{:10.2312/EGGH/EGGH05/015-022
,
booktitle = {Graphics Hardware
},
editor = {Michael Meissner and Bengt-Olaf Schneider
},
title = {{KD-Tree Acceleration Structures for a GPU Raytracer
}},
author = {Foley, Tim and 
Sugerman, Jeremy
},
year = {2005
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-3471
},
ISBN = {1-59593-086-8
},
DOI = {/10.2312/EGGH/EGGH05/015-022
}
}

URI

https://doi.org/10.2312/EGGH/EGGH05/015-022

Collections

EGGH05: SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware 2005

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