Multi-core data streaming architecture for ray tracing

Abstract

Ray tracing is a computer graphics technique to generate photo-realistic images. All though it can generate precise and realistic images, it requires a large amount of computation. The intersection test between rays and objects is one of the dominant factors of the ray tracing speed. We propose a new parallel processing architecture, named R PL S, for accelerating the ray tracing computation. R PL S boosts the speed of the intersection test by using a new algorithm based on ray-casting through planes, data streaming architecture offers highly efficient data provision in a multi-core environment. We estimate the performance of a future SoC implementation of R PL S by software simulation, and show 600 times speedup over a conventional CPU implementation.