StreamRay: a stream filtering architecture for coherent ray tracing

The wide availability of commodity graphics processors has made real-time graphics an intrinsic component of the human/computer interface. These graphics cores accelerate the z-buffer algorithm and provide a highly interactive experience at a relatively low cost. However, many applications in entertainment, science, and industry require high quality lighting effects such as accurate shadows, reflection, and refraction. These effects can be difficult to achieve with zbuffer algorithms but are straightforward to implement using ray tracing. Although ray tracing is computationally more complex, the algorithm exhibits excellent scaling and parallelism properties. Nevertheless, ray tracing memory access patterns are difficult to predict and the parallelism speedup promise is therefore hard to achieve. This paper highlights a novel approach to ray tracing based on stream filtering and presents StreamRay, a multicore wide SIMD microarchitecture that delivers interactive frame rates of 15-32 ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Karthik Ramani, Christiaan P. Gribble, Al Davis
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2009, Programming Languages, Ray Tracing, Ray Tracing Operations, Wide Simd Microarchitecture