Performance Comparison of Bounding Volume Hierarchies and Kd-Trees for GPU Ray Tracing

We present a performance comparison of bounding volume hierarchies and kd‐trees for ray tracing on many‐core architectures (GPUs). The comparison is focused on rendering times and traversal characteristics on the GPU using data structures that were optimized for very high performance of tracing rays...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computer graphics forum Vol. 35; no. 8; pp. 68 - 79
Main Authors: Vinkler, Marek, Havran, Vlastimil, Bittner, Jiří
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.12.2016
Subjects:
Analysis
Architecture
Central processing units
Computer architecture
CPUs
Criteria
Data structures
GPU
Hierarchies
I.3.1 [Computer Graphics]: Hardware architecture-Parallel processing
I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]: Methodology and Techniques-Graphics data structures and data types
I.3.7 [Computational Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism-Raytracing
I.3.7 [Computational Graphics]: Three‐Dimensional Graphics and Realism—Raytracing; I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]: Methodology and Techniques—Graphics data structures and data types; I.3.1 [Computer Graphics]: Hardware architecture—Parallel processing
Image processing systems
object-partitioning
Parallel processing
Performance assessment
performance comparison
Profiling
Ray tracing
Rendering
space-partitioning
Studies
ISSN:0167-7055, 1467-8659
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We present a performance comparison of bounding volume hierarchies and kd‐trees for ray tracing on many‐core architectures (GPUs). The comparison is focused on rendering times and traversal characteristics on the GPU using data structures that were optimized for very high performance of tracing rays. To achieve low rendering times, we extensively examine the constants used in termination criteria for the two data structures. We show that for a contemporary GPU architecture (NVIDIA Kepler) bounding volume hierarchies have higher ray tracing performance than kd‐trees for simple and moderately complex scenes. On the other hand, kd‐trees have higher performance for complex scenes, in particular for those with high depth complexity. Finally, we analyse the causes of the performance discrepancies using the profiling characteristics of the ray tracing kernels. We present a performance comparison of bounding volume hierarchies and kd‐trees for ray tracing on many‐core architectures (GPUs). The comparison is focused on rendering times and traversal characteristics on the GPU using data structures that were optimized for very high performance of tracing rays. To achieve low rendering times, we extensively examine the constants used in termination criteria for the two data structures. We show that for a contemporary GPU architecture (NVIDIA Kepler) bounding volume hierarchies have higher ray tracing performance than kd‐trees for simple and moderately complex scenes.
Bibliography:Czech Science Foundation - No. P202/12/2413
istex:85253D7BFC778759A349878547366788F4849F95
ark:/67375/WNG-6M1HG181-3
ArticleID:CGF12776
Czech Technical University in Prague - No. SGS13/214/OHK3/3T/13
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ISSN:0167-7055
1467-8659
DOI:10.1111/cgf.12776