Browsing by Author "Benthin, Carsten"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Compressed-Leaf Bounding Volume Hierarchies
    (ACM, 2018) Benthin, Carsten; Wald, Ingo; Woop, Sven; Áfra, Attila T.; Patney, Anjul and Niessner, Matthias
    We propose and evaluate what we call Compressed-Leaf Bounding Volume Hierarchies (CLBVH), which strike a balance between compressed and non-compressed BVH layouts. Our CLBVH layout introduces dedicated compressed multi-leaf nodes where most effective at reducing memory use, and uses regular BVH nodes for inner nodes and small, isolated leaves. We show that when implemented within the Embree ray tracing framework, this approach achieves roughly the same memory savings as Embree's compressed BVH layout, while maintaining almost the full performance of its fastest non-compressed BVH.
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    PLOC++ : Parallel Locally-Ordered Clustering for Bounding Volume Hierarchy Construction Revisited
    (ACM Association for Computing Machinery, 2022) Benthin, Carsten; Drabinski, Radoslaw; Tessari, Lorenzo; Dittebrandt, Addis; Josef Spjut; Marc Stamminger; Victor Zordan
    We propose a novel version of the GPU-oriented massively parallel locally-ordered clustering (PLOC) algorithm for constructing bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs). Our method focuses on removing the weaknesses of the original approach by simplifying and fusing different phases, while replacing most performance critical parts by novel and more efficient algorithms. This combination allows for outperforming the original approach by a factor of 1.9 - 2.3×.
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    Ray Tracing Lossy Compressed Grid Primitives
    (The Eurographics Association, 2021) Benthin, Carsten; Vaidyanathan, Karthik; Woop, Sven; Theisel, Holger and Wimmer, Michael
    We propose a new watertight representation of geometry for ray tracing highly complex scenes in a memory efficient manner. Polygon meshes in the scene are first converted into compressed grid primitives, which are represented by a base bilinear patch with quantized displacement vectors. Ray-scene intersections are then computed by efficiently decompressing these grids onthe- fly and intersecting the implicit triangles. Our representation requires just 5:4??6:6 bytes per triangle for the combined geometry and acceleration structure, resulting in a 5-7x reduction in memory footprint compared to indexed triangle meshes. This is achieved with less than 15% increase in rendering time.
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    Real-Time Ray Tracing of Micro-Poly Geometry with Hierarchical Level of Detail
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2023) Benthin, Carsten; Peters, Christoph; Bikker, Jacco; Gribble, Christiaan
    In recent work, Nanite has demonstrated how to rasterize virtualized micro-poly geometry in real time, thus enabling immense geometric complexity. We present a system that employs similar methods for real-time ray tracing of micro-poly geometry. The geometry is preprocessed in almost the same fashion: Nearby triangles are clustered together and clusters get merged and simplified to obtain hierarchical level of detail (LOD). Then these clusters are compressed and stored in a GPU-friendly data structure. At run time, Nanite selects relevant clusters, decompresses them and immediately rasterizes them. Instead of rasterization, we decompress each selected cluster into a small bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) in the format expected by the ray tracing hardware. Then we build a complete BVH on top of the bounding volumes of these clusters and use it for ray tracing. Our BVH build reaches more than 74% of the attainable peak memory bandwidth and thus it can be done per frame. Since LOD selection happens per frame at the granularity of clusters, all triangles cover a small area in screen space.
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    Stochastic Subsets for BVH Construction
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2023) Tessari, Lorenzo; Dittebrandt, Addis; Doyle, Michael J.; Benthin, Carsten; Myszkowski, Karol; Niessner, Matthias
    BVH construction is a critical component of real-time and interactive ray-tracing systems. However, BVH construction can be both compute and bandwidth intensive, especially when a large degree of dynamic geometry is present. Different build algorithms vary substantially in the traversal performance that they produce, making high quality construction algorithms desirable. However, high quality algorithms, such as top-down construction, are typically more expensive, limiting their benefit in real-time and interactive contexts. One particular challenge of high quality top-down construction algorithms is that the large working set at the top of the tree can make constructing these levels bandwidth-intensive, due to O(nlog(n)) complexity, limited cache locality, and less dense compute at these levels. To address this limitation, we propose a novel stochastic approach to GPU BVH construction that selects a representative subset to build the upper levels of the tree. As a second pass, the remaining primitives are clustered around the BVH leaves and further processed into a complete BVH. We show that our novel approach significantly reduces the construction time of top-down GPU BVH builders by a factor up to 1.8x, while achieving competitive rendering performance in most cases, and exceeding the performance in others.
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    Sub-triangle opacity masks for faster ray tracing of transparent objects
    (ACM, 2020) Gruen, Holger; Benthin, Carsten; Woop, Sven; Yuksel, Cem and Membarth, Richard and Zordan, Victor
    We propose an easy and simple-to-integrate approach to accelerate ray tracing of alpha-tested transparent geometry with a focus on Microsoft® DirectX® or Vulkan® ray tracing extensions. Pre-computed bit masks are used to quickly determine fully transparent and fully opaque regions of triangles thereby skipping the more expensive alpha-test operation. These bit masks allow us to skip up to 86% of all transparency tests, yielding up to 40% speed up in a proof-of-concept DirectX® software only implementation.
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    A Survey on Bounding Volume Hierarchies for Ray Tracing
    (The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2021) Meister, Daniel; Ogaki, Shinji; Benthin, Carsten; Doyle, Michael J.; Guthe, Michael; Bittner, Jirí; Bühler, Katja and Rushmeier, Holly
    Ray tracing is an inherent part of photorealistic image synthesis algorithms. The problem of ray tracing is to find the nearest intersection with a given ray and scene. Although this geometric operation is relatively simple, in practice, we have to evaluate billions of such operations as the scene consists of millions of primitives, and the image synthesis algorithms require a high number of samples to provide a plausible result. Thus, scene primitives are commonly arranged in spatial data structures to accelerate the search. In the last two decades, the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) has become the de facto standard acceleration data structure for ray tracing-based rendering algorithms in offline and recently also in real-time applications. In this report, we review the basic principles of bounding volume hierarchies as well as advanced state of the art methods with a focus on the construction and traversal. Furthermore, we discuss industrial frameworks, specialized hardware architectures, other applications of bounding volume hierarchies, best practices, and related open problems.
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    Wide BVH Traversal with a Short Stack
    (The Eurographics Association, 2019) Vaidyanathan, Karthik; Woop, Sven; Benthin, Carsten; Steinberger, Markus and Foley, Tim
    Compressed wide bounding volume hierarchies can significantly improve the performance of incoherent ray traversal, through a smaller working set of inner nodes and therefore a higher cache hit rate. While inner nodes in the hierarchy can be compressed, the size of the working set for a full traversal stack remains a significant overhead. In this paper we introduce an algorithm for wide bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) traversal that uses a short stack of just a few entries. This stack can be fully stored in scarce on-chip memory, which is especially important for GPUs and dedicated ray tracing hardware implementations. Our approach in particular generalizes the restart trail algorithm for binary BVHs to BVHs of arbitrary widths. Applying our algorithm to wide BVHs, we demonstrate that the number of traversal steps with just five stack entries is close to that of a full traversal stack. We also propose an extension to efficiently cull leaf nodes when a closer intersection has been found, which reduces ray primitive intersections by up to 14%.