Publication details
Parallel On-Demand Hierarchy Construction on Contemporary GPUs
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2015.2465898 |
| Field | Informatics |
| Keywords | ray tracing; GPU; bounding volume hierarchies; kd-trees; lazy build |
| Description | We present the first parallel on-demand spatial hierarchy construction algorithm targeting ray tracing on many-core processors such as GPUs. The method performs simultaneous ray traversal and spatial hierarchy construction focused on the parts of the data structure being traversed. The method is based on a versatile framework built around a task pool and runs entirely on the GPU. We show that the on-demand construction can improve rendering times compared to full hierarchy construction. We evaluate our method on both object (BVH) and space (kd-tree) subdivision data structures and compare them mutually. The on-demand method is particularly beneficial for rendering large scenes with high occlusion. We also present SAH kd-tree builder that outperforms previous state-of-the-art builders running on the GPU. |