Out of core GPU ray tracing of complex scenes
Increased demand for global illumination, image based lighting and simplified workflow have pushed raytracing into mainstream. Many rendering and simulation algorithms that were considered strictly offline are becoming more interactive on massively parallel GPUs. Unfortunately, the amount of available memory on modern GPUs is relatively small. Scenes for feature film rendering and visualization have large geometric complexity and can easily contain millions of polygons and a large number of texture maps and other data attributes. In this talk, we describe a general purpose out of core ray tracing engine for the GPU where we address data management, ray intersection and shading. We utilize a GPU data cache that enables efficient access of out of core data. We develop a novel ray intersection algorithm built around acceleration structure that brings needed data on demand using page swapping. We further reduce memory usage by using a simple geometry quantization. The ray tracing engine is used to implement a variety of rendering and light transport algorithms.
SIGGRAPH '11