TRaX: A Multi-Threaded Architecture for Real-Time Ray Tracing

Spjut, Josef; Boulos, Solomon; Kopta, Daniel; Brunvand, Erik; Kellis, Spencer

doi:10.1109/sasp.2008.4570794

Cited by 21 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Each core consists of 32 thread processors, and an L1 cache and some floating point function units shared within the core. As reported in [4] we estimate that in a 150mm square die we could instantiate 22 cores (704 thread processors) in a 130nm technology and 78 cores (2496 thread processors) in a 65nm technology using standard cell based implementations at a conservative 500MHz. Higher densities and speeds would be achievable with more use of custom circuits.…”

Section: Trax Architecturementioning

confidence: 87%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Comparing incoherent ray performance of TRaX vs. Manta

Kopta

Spjut

Brunvand

et al. 2008

2008 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

TRaX (Threaded Ray eXecution) is a highly parallel multithreaded, multi-core processor architecture designed for real-time ray tracing. One motivation behind TRaX is to accelerate singleray performance instead of relying on ray-packets in SIMD mode to boost throughput, which can fail as packets become incoherent. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach we implement a path tracer on the TRaX simulator and measure performance as the secondary rays become less coherent. We are able to show that TRaX exhibits only minor slowdown on highly incoherent rays compared to a well-optimized SIMD-packet based path tracer which suffers significant slowdown as rays become incoherent.

show abstract

Section: Trax Architecturementioning

confidence: 87%

“…The TRaX architecture is a multi-core chip architecture described in more detail in [4]. Our overall chip design is a die consisting of an L2 cache with an interface to off-chip memory and a number of repeated identical cores.…”

Section: Trax Architecturementioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing incoherent ray performance of TRaX vs. Manta

Kopta

Spjut

Brunvand

et al. 2008

2008 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As SaarCOR and ray casting solutions, RPU also uses packet ray-tracing which can result in performance drops in the case of incoherent rays. The TRaX architecture [16] implements a different solutionmany identical cores consisting of simple thread processors. It can be viewed as general pur-pose architecture and is used in other papers to simu-late their hardware [7].…”

Section: Related Work In Ray Tracing Acceleration Hardwarementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Also [1] implements the idea of partitioning BVH into treelets (which approximately matches cache sizes) and group-ing rays according to treelets they intersect. Another architecture -STRaTA [7] is built on top of the TRaX [16] and implements modified treelet technique of [1] and streaming approach to processing rays associated with each treelet. STRaTA adds special small buffers to memory hierarchy to store rays.…”

Section: Related Work In Ray Tracing Acceleration Hardwarementioning

confidence: 99%

Examination of the Nvidia RTX

Sanzharov¹,

Горбоносов²,

Gorbonosov³

et al. 2019

GraphiCon'2019 Proceedings. Volume 2

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Hardware acceleration of ray tracing is an active research field, but only with the release of Nvidia Turing architecture GPUs it became widely available. Nvidia RTX is a proprietary hardware ray tracing acceleration technology available in Vulkan and DirectX APIs as well as through Nvidia OptiX. Since the implementation details are unknown to the public, there are a lot of questions about what it actually does under the hood. To find answers to these questions, we implemented classic path tracing algorithm using RTX via both DirectX and Vulkan and conducted several experiments with it to investigate the inner workings of this technology. We tested actual hardware implementation of RTX technology on RTX2070 GPU and the software fallback in the driver on GTX1070 GPU. In this paper we present results of these experiments and speculate on the internal architecture of RTX.

show abstract

“…Ray tracing implementations on these architectures is accomplished through software kernels that then run on the processors. Other multicore architectures for ray tracing include SaarCore [20] [21], RPU [22] [23] and TRaX [24].…”

Section: B Graphics Hardwarementioning

confidence: 99%

A hardware pipeline for accelerating ray traversal algorithms on streaming processors

Steffen

Zambreno

2010

2010 IEEE 8th Symposium on Application Specific Processors (SASP)

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Ray Tracing is a graphics rendering method that uses rays to trace the path of light in a computer model. To accelerate the processing of rays, scenes are typically compiled into smaller spatial boxes using a tree structure and rays then traverse the tree structure to determine relevant spatial boxes. This allows computations involving rays and scene objects to be limited to only objects close to the ray and does not require processing all elements in the computer model. We present a ray traversal pipeline designed to accelerate ray tracing traversal algorithms using a combination of currently used programmable graphics processors and a new fixed hardware pipeline. Our fixed hardware pipeline performs an initial traversal operation that quickly identifies a smaller sized, fixed granularity spatial bounding box from the original scene. This spatial box can then be traversed further to identify subsequently smaller spatial bounding boxes using any user-defined acceleration algorithm. We show that our pipeline allows for an expected level of user programmability, including development of custom data structures, and can support a wide range of processor architectures. The performance of our pipeline is evaluated for ray traversal and intersection stages using a kd-tree ray tracing algorithm and a custom simulator modeling a generic streaming processor architecture. Experimental results show that our pipeline reduces the number of executed instructions on a graphics processor for the traversal operation by 2.15X for visible rays. The memory bandwidth required for traversal is also reduced by a factor of 1.3X for visible rays.

show abstract

TRaX: A Multi-Threaded Architecture for Real-Time Ray Tracing

Cited by 21 publications

References 20 publications

Comparing incoherent ray performance of TRaX vs. Manta

Comparing incoherent ray performance of TRaX vs. Manta

Examination of the Nvidia RTX

A hardware pipeline for accelerating ray traversal algorithms on streaming processors

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About