Load Balancing Algorithm for Real-Time Ray Tracing of Dynamic Scenes

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a load balancing algorithm that accelerates ray tracing effectively and simply manner. The algorithm was developed in a hybrid system consisting of a CPU and hardware dedicated to ray tracing. Tree-building is processed on the CPU, and rendering is executed by the ray tracing-dedicated hardware. Because these components operate independently of each other, the final performance in terms of frames per second (FPS) is determined based on the time spent on tree-building or rendering, whichever process takes longer. This characteristic of a hybrid system is reflected in the developed algorithm, which dynamically adjusts tree-build parameters at every frame, thereby minimizing the interval between tree-building and rendering times. These effects ultimately increase FPS performance. Experiments at a resolution of 1920 × 1080 involving various dynamic scenes indicated that FPS performance improved by an average of 75.3% when the proposed algorithm was used.

An Implementation of Multi-Chip Architecture for Real-Time Ray Tracing Based on Parallel Frame Rendering

“…RayCore [27] is another mobile ray-tracing hardware architecture comprising multiple ray-tracing units (RTUs) and a tree-build unit (TBU) for supporting dynamic scenes. Lee et al [28] later applied a load-balancing algorithm to increase the performance of RayCore in dynamic scenes. Lin et al [29] presented a hardware architecture for accelerating traversal of dual-split trees [30], which are a new AS type including splitting and carving nodes.…”

“…Figure 2 shows an example of a block diagram of a ray-tracing system with a single FPGA. This is similar to the ray-tracing hardware system presented in [28]. One tree-build unit (TBU) performs tree-build, and sub-blocks of the screen are assigned to 12 RTUs, which perform rendering.…”