T&I Engine: Traversal and Intersection Engine for Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracing

摘要

Ray tracing naturally supports high-quality global illumination ef- fects, but it is computationally costly. Traversal and intersection operations dominate the computation of ray tracing. To accelerate these two operations, we propose a hardware architecture integrat- ing three novel approaches. First, we present an ordered depth-first layout and a traversal architecture using this layout to reduce the required memory bandwidth. Second, we propose a three-phase ray-triangle intersection architecture that takes advantage of early exit. Third, we propose a latency hiding architecture defined as the ray accumulation unit. Cycle-accurate simulation results indicate our architecture can achieve interactive distributed ray tracing.