HART: A Hybrid Architecture for Ray Tracing Animated Scenes.

Area of Science:

• Computer Graphics
• Hardware Architecture

Background:

• Ray tracing animated scenes requires efficient bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) management.
• Existing methods face challenges with real-time performance and resource utilization for dynamic scenes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel hybrid hardware architecture for accelerated ray tracing of animated scenes.
• To reduce computational overhead and memory bandwidth requirements for BVH updates and traversal.

Main Methods:

• A hybrid architecture combining dedicated ray-tracing hardware and a CPU.
• An asynchronous BVH construction approach.
• A novel traversal scheme utilizing primitive's axis-aligned bounding box (PrimAABB) for efficient tree updates.
• An L1 cache scheme exploiting memory access patterns.

Main Results:

• Cycle-accurate simulations verified the proposed architecture.
• Real-time Whitted ray tracing achieved for animated scenes at 1,920 × 1,200 resolution.
• Demonstrated minimized resource requirements for tree updates and high-performance rendering.

Conclusions:

• The hybrid architecture effectively accelerates ray tracing for animated scenes.
• The proposed PrimAABB traversal and cache schemes significantly reduce computational and memory overhead.
• Achieved real-time performance, showcasing the architecture's viability for demanding graphics applications.