HART: A Hybrid Architecture for Ray Tracing Animated Scenes

Abstract

We present a hybrid architecture, inspired by asynchronous BVH construction [1], for ray tracing animated scenes. Our hybrid architecture utilizes heterogeneous hardware resources: dedicated ray-tracing hardware for BVH updates and ray traversal and a CPU for BVH reconstruction. We also present a traversal scheme using a primitive's axis-aligned bounding box (PrimAABB). This scheme reduces ray-primitive intersection tests by reusing existing BVH traversal units and the primAABB data for tree updates; it enables the use of shallow trees to reduce tree build times, tree sizes, and bus bandwidth requirements. Furthermore, we present a cache scheme that exploits consecutive memory access by reusing data in an L1 cache block. We perform cycle-accurate simulations to verify our architecture, and the simulation results indicate that the proposed architecture can achieve real-time Whitted ray tracing animated scenes at 1,920 × 1,200 resolution. This result comes from our high-performance hardware architecture and minimized resource requirements for tree updates.