Simpler and faster HLBVH with work queues

ABSTRACT

A recently developed algorithm called Hierachical Linear Bounding Volume Hierarchies (HLBVH) has demonstrated the feasibility of reconstructing the spatial index needed for ray tracing in real-time, even in the presence of millions of fully dynamic triangles. In this work we present a simpler and faster variant of HLBVH, where all the complex book-keeping of prefix sums, compaction and partial breadth-first tree traversal needed for spatial partitioning has been replaced with an elegant pipeline built on top of efficient work queues and binary search. The new algorithm is both faster and more memory efficient, removing the need for temporary storage of geometry data for intermediate computations. Finally, the same pipeline has been extended to parallelize the construction of the top-level SAH optimized tree on the GPU, eliminating round-trips to the CPU, accelerating the overall construction speed by a factor of 5 to 10x.

References

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Index Terms

• Computer systems organization

  • Architectures

    • Other architectures

      • Special purpose systems

• Computing methodologies

  • Computer graphics

    • Graphics systems and interfaces

    • Image manipulation

      • Texturing

    • Rendering

      • Ray tracing