GPU Ray Tracing Based on Reduced Bounding Volume Hierarchies

Abstract

We present a bounding volume hierarchy construction based on a culling technique for performing ray tracing on manycore GPUs. The objects are divided into view-sets of triangles with respect to a set of view targets (including the camera and the light sources). A bounding volume hierarchy, namely reduced bounding volume hierarchy (RBVH), is then constructed for each view-set. Each RBVH contains a portion of the triangles of the objects. The ray traversal is improved for primary and shadow rays, leading to a net improvement of ray tracing. We also handle multiple lights that are close to each other. Our method has been implemented on manycore GPUs and evaluated for dynamics scenes. Experimental results show that our method improves ray tracing for primary and shadow rays.