Hardware Support for Interactive Ray Tracing

University Of Utah, Salt Lake City UT

Investigators

Abstract

The Utah Hardware Ray Tracing group is designing special purpose hardware that uses ray tracing to generate computer graphic images. Ray tracing creates much higher quality and more realistic images than existing commercial graphics chips, all of which use a z-buffer based algorithm, and is more efficient when the scene object database is extremely large or where the primitive objects are not simple triangles. However, ray tracing is considered too slow to work interactively on commodity computers. The end goal of this research is to develop technology to enable commodity ray trace chips that can replace today's graphics processing units and enable higher quality and more realistic graphics capabilities for future computers. This research casts the ray tracing algorithm domain into a specialized processor that includes multiple ray tracing pipelines. Ray tracing is a naturally parallel application that can take advantage of parallel hardware, and specialization of the processor hardware enables vastly increased performance over software running on a generic CPU. Their design strategy is based on previous work in designing domain specific processors that includes run-time configuration of the datapath. This allows the device to operate at very close to the speed of a fully custom pipeline, but with enough programmability so that variations in algorithm can be accommodated after fabrication. While special purpose hardware and ray tracing are active research areas, little is known about the design of special purpose ray tracing hardware. This project includes a VLSI researcher, a memory architect, and two ray tracing specialists, precisely the areas needed for this project. The project will produce knowledge about a rich set of intellectual issues related to computer graphics and the design of special purpose memory systems and computational pipelines. The results of this project have the potential to help move high-end computer graphics capabilities onto every PC. The group's end goal is to bring a graphics capability that is currently only available to the computing elite into everyday use.