Massively parallel identification of intersection points for GPGPU ray tracing

Abstract

The latest advancements in computer graphics architectures, as the replacement of some fixed stages of the pipeline for programmable stages (shaders), have been enabling the development of parallel general purpose applications on massively parallel graphics architectures (Streaming Processors). For years the graphics processing unit (GPU) is being optimized for increasingly high throughput of massively parallel floating-point computations. However, only the applications that exhibit Data Level parallelism can achieve substantial acceleration in such architectures. In this paper we present a parallel implementation of the GridRT architecture for GPGPU ray tracing. Such architecture can expose two levels of parallelism in ray tracing: parallel ray processing and parallel intersection tests, respectively. We also present a traditional parallel implementation of ray tracing in GPGPU, for comparison against the GridRT-GPGPU implementation. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.