Fast ray-triangle intersection computation using reconfigurable hardware

Abstract

We present a novel FPGA-accelerated architecture for fast collision detection among rigid bodies. This paper describes the design of the hardware architecture for several primitive intersection testing components implemented on a multi-FPGA Xilinx Virtex-II prototyping system. We focus on the acceleration of ray-triangle intersection operation which is the one of the most important operations in various applications such as collision detection and ray tracing. Our implementation result is a hardware-accelerated ray-triangle intersection engine that is capable of out-performing a 2.8 GHz Xeon processor, running a well-known high performance software ray-triangle intersection algorithm, by up to a factor of seventy. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed approach could prove to be faster than current GPU-based algorithms as well as CPU based algorithms for ray-triangle intersection. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.