Shading language compiler implementation for mobile ray tracing accelerator

Abstract

This paper presents a shading language compiler optimized for a mobile ray tracing acclerator, i.e., SGRT (Samsung GPU Ray Tracing). By the compiler, application development productivity has been dramatically improved: 1) as an application-specific abstraction layer, a shading language makes it possible for application developers to implement ray generators and shaders much more easily and intuitively than with a general and low-level language, i.e., standard C language (up to 81.6% less source lines). 2) high performance is achievable without a deep understanding of the programmable shader architecture based on CGRA (Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Array) which is complex to optimize especially in presence of many conditional branches (up to 1.58 times higher throughput).