Bounding Volume Hierarchies versus Kd-trees on Contemporary Many-Core Architectures

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Authors

VINKLER Marek HAVRAN Vlastimil BITTNER Jiří

Year of publication 2014
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference Proceedings of the 30th Spring Conference on Computer Graphics
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Informatics

Citation
Web http://www.fi.muni.cz/~xvinkl/publications.html
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2643188.2643196
Field Informatics
Keywords bounding volume hierarchy; kd-tree; performance study; ray tracing
Description We present a performance comparison of bounding volume hierarchies and kd-trees for ray tracing on many-core architectures (GPUs). The comparison is focused on rendering times and traversal characteristics on the GPU using data structures that were optimized for maximum performance of tracing rays irrespective of the time needed for their build. We show that for a contemporary GPU architecture (NVIDIA Kepler) bounding volume hierarchies have higher ray tracing performance than kd-trees for simple and moderately complex scenes. Kd-trees, on the other hand, have higher performance for complex scenes, in particular for those with occlusion.
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