Fast Ray Tracing on Larrabee using Multi-Frustum Traversal
Ingo Wald
Advanced Graphics Architectures Group at Intel Labs
Talk
Ingo Wald is currently a Research Scientist at the Advanced Graphics Architectures Group at Intel Labs. After receiving his PhD in engineering from Saarland University, Germany, he first did a one-year Post-Doc at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbruecken, Germany. He then joined the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah, where he also fulfilled the role of a Research Assistant Professor at the School of Computing. In 2007, Ingo left the University of Utah to join Intel Corp as a Research Scientist. Ingo’s research interest revolve around all aspects of ray tracing and lighting simulation, realtime graphics, parallel computing, and general visual/high-performance computing.
Following a brief overview over the Larrabee architecture, we discuss Larrabee’s advantages and challenges for high-performance ray tracing, and demonstrate its potential based on a sample ray tracing engine. We then outline an approach based on traversing multiple ray frusta in parallel to achieve even higher ray traversal performance. Based on simulation results for primary and soft shadow rays, we show that our approach can significantly outperform traditional packet-based ray tracing.