Variable Rate Ray Tracing for Virtual Reality

Abstract

This short paper presents a method called Variable Rate Ray Tracing to reduce the performance cost with minimal quality loss when facilitating hardware-accelerated ray tracing for Virtual Reality. This method is applied to the ray generation stage in the ray tracing pipeline to vary the ray tracing rate based on the scene specific information. The method uses 3 different control policies to effectively reduce rays generated per second for various needs. Based on the benchmark, this method can improve more than 30% frames per second(FPS) on current main-stream graphics hardware and virtual reality devices.