Toward a multicore architecture for real-time ray-tracing

Significant improvement to visual quality for real-time 3D graphics requires modeling of complex illumination effects like soft-shadows, reflections, and diffuse lighting interactions. The conventional Z-buffer algorithm driven GPU model does not provide sufficient support for this improvement. This paper targets the entire graphics system stack and demonstrates algorithms, a software architecture, and a hardware architecture for real-time rendering with a paradigm shift to ray-tracing. The three unique features of our system called Copernicus are support for dynamic scenes, high image quality, and execution on programmable multicore architectures. The focus of this paper is the synergy and interaction between applications, architecture, and evaluation. First, we describe the ray-tracing algorithms which are designed to use redundancy and partitioning to achieve locality. Second, we describe the architecture which uses ISA specialization, multithreading to hide memory delays and su...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Venkatraman Govindaraju, Peter Djeu, Karthikeyan Sankaralingam, Mary Vernon, William R. Mark
• Keywords: Algorithm Driven Gpu, Hardware, MICRO 2008, Real-time 3D Graphics, Real-time Rendering