Dependency Graph Scheduling in a Volumetric Ray Tracing Architecture
S. Frank, A. Kaufman
Graphics Hardware, 2002, pp. 127--135.
Abstract: We propose a volumetric ray tracing PCI board which uses FPGA components and on chip memory. In a multiboard system a super volume (i.e., one that is larger than on-board memory) can be either distributed or shared. In a single board system it must be fetched from main memory as needed. In any case the volume is sub-divided into cubic cells and process scheduling has a major impact on the rendering time. There is not generally a scheduling order which would allow each sub-volume to be read from memory only once. We introduce instead a new, compact representation of the cell ray-spawning dependencies of all rays, called Cell Tree. We use this Cell Tree to determine a good processing schedule for the next frame based on the ray dependencies from the previous frame. Experimental results show an average miss reduction of 30%. The main contribution of this paper is the generation of a Cell Tree for ray tracing which collects coherent bundles of rays with very little overhead. This is used to decrease overall memory access in sequences where there is good inter-frame coherence.
Article URL: http://diglib.eg.org/EG/DL/WS/EGGH/EGGH02/127-135.pdf
BibTeX format:
@inproceedings{Frank:2002:DGS,
  author = {S. Frank and A. Kaufman},
  title = {Dependency Graph Scheduling in a Volumetric Ray Tracing Architecture},
  booktitle = {Graphics Hardware},
  pages = {127--135},
  year = {2002},
}
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