The Experts below are selected from a list of 52083 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Ingo Wald - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Coherent multiresolution isosurface Ray Tracing
2009Co-Authors: Aaron M. Knoll, Ingo Wald, Charles D. HansenAbstract:We implement and evaluate a fast Ray Tracing method for rendering large structured volumes. Input data is losslessly compressed into an octree, enabling residency in CPU main memory. We cast packets of coherent Rays through a min/max acceleration structure within the octree, employing a slice-based technique to amortize the higher cost of compressed data access. By employing a multiresolution level of detail (LOD) scheme in conjunction with packets, coherent Ray Tracing can efficiently render inherently incoherent scenes of complex data. We achieve higher performance with lesser footprint than previous isosurface Ray tracers, and deliver large frame buffers, smooth gradient normals and shadows at relatively lesser cost. In this context, we weigh the strengths of coherent Ray Tracing against those of the conventional single-Ray approach, and present a systemthat visualizes large volumes at full data resolution on commodity computers.
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interactive isosurface Ray Tracing of time varying tetrahedral volumes
2007Co-Authors: Ingo Wald, Heiko Friedrich, Aaron Knoll, Charles HansenAbstract:We describe a system for interactively rendering isosurfaces of tetrahedral finite-element scalar fields using coherent Ray Tracing techniques on the CPU. By employing state-of-the art methods in polygonal Ray Tracing, namely aggressive packet/frustum traversal of a bounding volume hierarchy, we can accommodate large and time-varying unstructured data. In conjunction with this efficiency structure, we introduce a novel technique for intersecting Ray packets with tetrahedral primitives. Ray Tracing is flexible, allowing for dynamic changes in isovalue and time step, visualization of multiple isosurfaces, shadows, and depth-peeling transparency effects. The resulting system offers the intuitive simplicity of isosurfacing, guaranteed-correct visual results, and ultimately a scalable, dynamic and consistently interactive solution for visualizing unstructured volumes.
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packet based whitted and distribution Ray Tracing
2007Co-Authors: Solomon Boulos, Peter Shirley, Dave Edwards, Dylan Lacewell, Joe Kniss, Jan Kautz, Ingo WaldAbstract:Much progress has been made toward interactive Ray Tracing, but most research has focused specifically on Ray casting. A common approach is to use "packets" of Rays to amortize cost across sets of Rays. Whether "packets" can be used to speed up the cost of reflection and refraction Rays is unclear. The issue is complicated since such Rays do not share common origins and often have less directional coherence than viewing and shadow Rays. Since the primary advantage of Ray Tracing over rasterization is the computation of global effects, such as accurate reflection and refraction, this lack of knowledge should be corrected. We are also interested in exploring whether distribution Ray Tracing, due to its stochastic properties, further erodes the effectiveness of techniques used to accelerate Ray casting. This paper addresses the question of whether packet-based Ray Tracing algorithms can be effectively used for more than visibility computation. We show that by choosing an appropriate data structure and a suitable packet assembly algorithm we can extend the idea of "packets" from Ray casting to Whitted-style and distribution Ray Tracing, while maintaining efficiency.
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state of the art in Ray Tracing animated scenes
2007Co-Authors: Ingo Wald, William R Mark, Solomon Boulos, Johannes Gunther, Thiago Ize, Warren HuntAbstract:Ray Tracing has long been a method of choice for off-line rendering, but traditionally was too slow for interactive use. With faster hardware and algorithmic improvements this has recently changed, and real-time Ray Tracing is finally within reach. However, real-time capability also opens up new problems that do not exist in an off-line environment. In particular real-time Ray Tracing offers the opportunity to interactively Ray trace moving/animated scene content. This presents a challenge to the data structures that have been developed for Ray Tracing over the past few decades. Spatial data structures crucial for fast Ray Tracing must be rebuilt or updated as the scene changes, and this can become a bottleneck for the speed of Ray Tracing. This bottleneck has recently received much attention by researchers and that has resulted in a multitude of different algorithms, data structures and strategies for handling animated scenes. The effectiveness of techniques for Ray Tracing dynamic scenes vary dramatically depending on details such as scene complexity, model structure, type of motion and the coherency of the Rays. Consequently, there is so far no approach that is best in all cases, and determining the best technique for a particular problem can be a challenge. In this State of the Art Report (STAR), we aim to survey the different approaches to Ray Tracing animated scenes, discussing their strengths and weaknesses, and their relationship to other approaches. The overall goal is to help the reader choose the best approach depending on the situation, and to expose promising areas where there is potential for algorithmic improvements.
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Ray Tracing animated scenes using coherent grid traversal
2006Co-Authors: Ingo Wald, Thiago Ize, Andrew Kensler, Aaron Knoll, Steven G. ParkerAbstract:We present a new approach to interactive Ray Tracing of moderate-sized animated scenes based on traversing frustum-bounded packets of coherent Rays through uniform grids. By incrementally computing the overlap of the frustum with a slice of grid cells, we accelerate grid traversal by more than a factor of 10, and achieve Ray Tracing performance competitive with the fastest known packet-based kd-tree Ray tracers. The ability to efficiently rebuild the grid on every frame enables this performance even for fully dynamic scenes that typically challenge interactive Ray Tracing systems.
Philipp Slusallek - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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rtsg Ray Tracing for x3d via a flexible rendering framework
2009Co-Authors: Dmitri Rubinstein, Iliyan Georgiev, Benjamin Schug, Philipp SlusallekAbstract:VRML and X3D are the most widely adopted standards for interactive 3D content interchange. However, they are both designed around the common restricted functionality available in hardware graphics processors. Thus, most existing scene graph implementations are tightly integrated with rasterization APIs, which have difficulties simulating advanced global lighting effects. Conversely, complex photo-realistic effects are naturally supported by Ray Tracing based rendering algorithms [Glassner 1989]. Due to recent research advances and the constantly increasing computing power of commodity PCs, Ray Tracing is emerging as an interesting alternative for interactive applications. In this paper we present RTSG (Real-Time Scene Graph), a flexible scene management and rendering system. RTSG is X3D-compliant and has been designed to efficiently support both Ray Tracing and rasterization using a backend-independent rendering infrastructure. We describe two Ray Tracing and one rasterization backends and demonstrate that they achieve real-time rendering performance.
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rpu a programmable Ray processing unit for realtime Ray Tracing
2005Co-Authors: Sven Woop, Jorg Schmittler, Philipp SlusallekAbstract:Recursive Ray Tracing is a simple yet powerful and general approach for accurately computing global light transport and rendering high quality images. While recent algorithmic improvements and optimized parallel software implementations have increased Ray Tracing performance to realtime levels, no compact and programmable hardware solution has been available yet.This paper describes the architecture and a prototype implementation of a single chip, fully programmable Ray Processing Unit (RPU). It combines the flexibility of general purpose CPUs with the efficiency of current GPUs for data parallel computations. This design allows for realtime Ray Tracing of dynamic scenes with programmable material, geometry, and illumination shaders.Although, running at only 66 MHz the prototype FPGA implementation already renders images at up to 20 frames per second, which in many cases beats the performance of highly optimized software running on multi-GHz desktop CPUs. The performance and efficiency of the proposed architecture is analyzed using a variety of benchmark scenes.
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distributed interactive Ray Tracing of dynamic scenes
2003Co-Authors: Ingo Wald, Carsten Benthin, Philipp SlusallekAbstract:Recently developed interactive Ray Tracing systems combine the high performance of todays CPUs with new algorithms and implementations to achieve a flexible and high-performance rendering system offering high-quality, but nonetheless interactive 3D graphics. However, due to its history in offline rendering, interactive Ray Tracing is usually limited to static scenes and simple walkthroughs. In order to become truly interactive Ray Tracing must efficiently support dynamic scenes. We present a simple and practical method that allows to interactively Ray trace dynamic scenes in a distributed PC cluster environment. Our method separates the scene into independent objects with common properties concerning dynamic updates - similar to OpenGL display lists and scene graph libraries. Three classes of objects are distinguished: static objects are treated as before, objects undergoing affine transformations are handled by transforming Rays, and objects with unstructured motion are rebuilt whenever necessary. We present performance and scalability results of our system using a variety of test scenes stressing a wide range of dynamic behaviour.
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a virtual memory architecture for real time Ray Tracing hardware
2003Co-Authors: Jorg Schmittler, Alexander Leidinger, Philipp SlusallekAbstract:Abstract Real-time Ray Tracing offers a number of interesting benefits over current rasterization techniques. However, a major drawback has been that Ray Tracing requires access to the entire scene data base. This is particularly problematic for hardware implementations that only have a limited amount of dedicated on-board memory. In this paper we propose a virtual memory architecture for Ray Tracing that efficiently renders scenes many times larger than the available on-board memory. Instead of wasting large dedicated memory on a graphics card, scene data is stored in main memory, and on-board memory is used only as a cache. We show that typical scenes from computer games only require less than 8 MB of cache memory while 64 MB are sufficient even for scenes with GBs of geometry and textures. The caching approach also minimizes the bandwidth between the graphics subsystem and the host such that even a standard PCI connection is sufficient.
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saarcor a hardware architecture for Ray Tracing
2002Co-Authors: Jorg Schmittler, Ingo Wald, Philipp SlusallekAbstract:The Ray Tracing algorithmis well-known for its ability to generate high-quality images and its flexibility to support advanced rendering and lighting effects. Interactive Ray Tracing has been shown to work well on clusters of PCs and supercomputers but direct hardware support for Ray Tracing has been difficult to implement.In this paper, we present a new, scalable, modular, and highly efficient hardware architecture for real-time Ray Tracing. It achieves high performance with extremely low memory bandwidth requirements by efficiently Tracing bundles of Rays. The architecture is easily configurable to support a variety of workloads. For OpenGL-like scenes our architecture offers performance comparable to state-of-the-artrasterization chips. In addition, it supports all the usual Ray Tracing features including exact shadows, reflections, and refraction and is capable of efficiently handling complex scenes with millions of triangles. The architecture and its performance in different configurations is analyzed based on cycle-accurate simulations.
Steven G. Parker - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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optix a general purpose Ray Tracing engine
2010Co-Authors: Steven G. Parker, Heiko Friedrich, James Bigler, Andreas Dietrich, Jared Hoberock, David Luebke, David Kirk Mcallister, Morgan Mcguire, Keith Morley, Austin RobisonAbstract:The NVIDIA® OptiX™ Ray Tracing engine is a programmable system designed for NVIDIA GPUs and other highly parallel architectures. The OptiX engine builds on the key observation that most Ray Tracing algorithms can be implemented using a small set of programmable operations. Consequently, the core of OptiX is a domain-specific just-in-time compiler that generates custom Ray Tracing kernels by combining user-supplied programs for Ray generation, material shading, object intersection, and scene traversal. This enables the implementation of a highly diverse set of Ray Tracing-based algorithms and applications, including interactive rendering, offline rendering, collision detection systems, artificial intelligence queries, and scientific simulations such as sound propagation. OptiX achieves high performance through a compact object model and application of several Ray Tracing-specific compiler optimizations. For ease of use it exposes a single-Ray programming model with full support for recursion and a dynamic dispatch mechanism similar to virtual function calls.
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RTSL: a Ray Tracing Shading Language
2008Co-Authors: Steven G. Parker, Solomon Boulos, J. Bigler, A. RobisonAbstract:images were rendererd with the Manta interactive Ray tracer (left) and the batch Monte Carlo renderer Galileo (right). We present a new domain-specific programming language suitable for extending both interactive and non-interactive Ray Tracing systems. This language, called “Ray Tracing shading language ” (RTSL), builds on the GLSL language that is a part of the OpenGL specification and familiar to GPU programmers. This language allows a programmer to implement new cameras, primitives, textures, lights, and materials that can be used in multiple rendering systems. RTSL presents a single-Ray interface that is easy to program for novice programmers. Through an advanced compiler, packetbased SIMD-optimized code can be generated that is performance competitive with hand-optimized code. This language and compiler combination allows sophisticated primitives, materials and textures to realize the performance gains possible by SIMD and Ray packets without the low-level programming burden. In addition to the packet-based Manta system, the compiler targets two additional rendering systems to exercise this flexibility: the PBRT system and the batch Monte Carlo renderer Galileo.
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design for parallel interactive Ray Tracing systems
2006Co-Authors: James Bigler, Abe Stephens, Steven G. ParkerAbstract:We describe the software architecture of the Manta interactive Ray tracer and describe its application in engineering and scientific visualization. Although numerous Ray Tracing software packages have been developed, much of the traditional design wisdom needs to be updated to provide support for interactivity, high degrees of parallelism, and modern packet-based acceleration structures. We discuss situations that are normally not considered when designing a batch Ray tracer, and present methods to overcome those challenges. This paper advocates a forward looking programming model for interactive Ray Tracing that uses reconfigurable components to achieve flexibility while achieving scalability on large numbers of processors. Manta employs data structures motivated by modern micro-processor design that can exploit instruction-level parallelism. We discuss the design tradeoffs and the performance achieved for this system.
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Ray Tracing animated scenes using coherent grid traversal
2006Co-Authors: Ingo Wald, Thiago Ize, Andrew Kensler, Aaron Knoll, Steven G. ParkerAbstract:We present a new approach to interactive Ray Tracing of moderate-sized animated scenes based on traversing frustum-bounded packets of coherent Rays through uniform grids. By incrementally computing the overlap of the frustum with a slice of grid cells, we accelerate grid traversal by more than a factor of 10, and achieve Ray Tracing performance competitive with the fastest known packet-based kd-tree Ray tracers. The ability to efficiently rebuild the grid on every frame enables this performance even for fully dynamic scenes that typically challenge interactive Ray Tracing systems.
Tack Don Han - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Raycore a Ray Tracing hardware architecture for mobile devices
2014Co-Authors: Jae-ho Nah, Tack Don Han, Dinesh Manocha, Hyuckjoo Kwon, Dongseok Kim, Cheolho Jeong, Jinhong Park, Woo Chan ParkAbstract:We present RayCore, a mobile Ray-Tracing hardware architecture. RayCore facilitates high-quality rendering effects, such as reflection, refraction, and shadows, on mobile devices by performing real-time Whitted Ray Tracing. RayCore consists of two major components: Ray-Tracing units (RTUs) based on a unified traversal and intersection pipeline and a tree-building unit (TBU) for dynamic scenes. The overall RayCore architecture offers considerable benefits in terms of die area, memory access, and power consumption. We have evaluated our architecture based on FPGA and ASIC evaluations and demonstrate its performance on different benchmarks. According to the results, our architecture demonstrates high performance per unit area and unit energy, making it highly suitable for use in mobile devices.
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sgrt a mobile gpu architecture for real time Ray Tracing
2013Co-Authors: Wonjong Lee, Jae-ho Nah, Jin Woo Kim, Youngsam Shin, Jaedon Lee, Seokyoon Jung, Shihwa Lee, Hyunsang Park, Tack Don HanAbstract:Recently, with the increasing demand for photorealistic graphics and the rapid advances in desktop CPUs/GPUs, real-time Ray Tracing has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, Ray Tracing in the current mobile environment is very difficult because of inadequate computing power, memory bandwidth, and flexibility in mobile GPUs. In this paper, we present a novel mobile GPU architecture called SGRT (Samsung reconfigurable GPU based on Ray Tracing) in which a fast compact hardware accelerator and a flexible programmable shader are combined. SGRT has two key features: 1) an area-efficient parallel pipelined traversal unit; and 2) flexible and high-performance kernels for shading and Ray generation. Simulation results show that SGRT is potentially a versatile graphics solution for future application processors as it provides a real-time Ray Tracing performance at full HD resolution that can compete with that of existing desktop GPU Ray tracers. Our system is implemented on an FPGA platform, and mobile Ray Tracing is successfully demonstrated.
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T&I Engine: Traversal and Intersection Engine for Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracing
2011Co-Authors: Jae-ho Nah, Chan-min Park, Yun Hye Jung, Jeong Soo Park, Jin Woo Kim, Woo Chan Park, Tack Don HanAbstract: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. CR
Jae-ho Nah - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Raycore a Ray Tracing hardware architecture for mobile devices
2014Co-Authors: Jae-ho Nah, Tack Don Han, Dinesh Manocha, Hyuckjoo Kwon, Dongseok Kim, Cheolho Jeong, Jinhong Park, Woo Chan ParkAbstract:We present RayCore, a mobile Ray-Tracing hardware architecture. RayCore facilitates high-quality rendering effects, such as reflection, refraction, and shadows, on mobile devices by performing real-time Whitted Ray Tracing. RayCore consists of two major components: Ray-Tracing units (RTUs) based on a unified traversal and intersection pipeline and a tree-building unit (TBU) for dynamic scenes. The overall RayCore architecture offers considerable benefits in terms of die area, memory access, and power consumption. We have evaluated our architecture based on FPGA and ASIC evaluations and demonstrate its performance on different benchmarks. According to the results, our architecture demonstrates high performance per unit area and unit energy, making it highly suitable for use in mobile devices.
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sgrt a mobile gpu architecture for real time Ray Tracing
2013Co-Authors: Wonjong Lee, Jae-ho Nah, Jin Woo Kim, Youngsam Shin, Jaedon Lee, Seokyoon Jung, Shihwa Lee, Hyunsang Park, Tack Don HanAbstract:Recently, with the increasing demand for photorealistic graphics and the rapid advances in desktop CPUs/GPUs, real-time Ray Tracing has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, Ray Tracing in the current mobile environment is very difficult because of inadequate computing power, memory bandwidth, and flexibility in mobile GPUs. In this paper, we present a novel mobile GPU architecture called SGRT (Samsung reconfigurable GPU based on Ray Tracing) in which a fast compact hardware accelerator and a flexible programmable shader are combined. SGRT has two key features: 1) an area-efficient parallel pipelined traversal unit; and 2) flexible and high-performance kernels for shading and Ray generation. Simulation results show that SGRT is potentially a versatile graphics solution for future application processors as it provides a real-time Ray Tracing performance at full HD resolution that can compete with that of existing desktop GPU Ray tracers. Our system is implemented on an FPGA platform, and mobile Ray Tracing is successfully demonstrated.
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T&I Engine: Traversal and Intersection Engine for Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracing
2011Co-Authors: Jae-ho Nah, Chan-min Park, Yun Hye Jung, Jeong Soo Park, Jin Woo Kim, Woo Chan Park, Tack Don HanAbstract: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. CR
