FastTree: A Hardware KD-Tree Construction Acceleration Engine for Real-Time Ray Tracing
Institute of Microelectronics, Tsinghua University
18th ACM/IEEE Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE’15), 2015
@article{liu2015fasttree,
title={FastTree: A Hardware KD-Tree Construction Acceleration Engine for Real-Time Ray Tracing},
author={Liu, Xingyu and Deng, Yangdong and Ni, Yufei and Li, Zonghui},
year={2015}
}
The ray tracing algorithm is well-known for its ability to generate photo-realistic rendering effects. Recent years have witnessed a renewed momentum in pushing it to real-time for better user experience. Today the construction of acceleration structures, e.g., kd-tree, has become the bottleneck of ray tracing. A dedicated hardware architecture, FastTree, was proposed for kd-tree construction by adopting a fully parallel construction algorithm. FastTree was validated by an FPGA prototype and evaluated as an ASIC implementation. Experiment result shows FastTree outperforms existing hardware construction engines by a factor of nearly 4X at a similar area and power budget.
March 12, 2015 by hgpu
