Out-of-core ray tracing with memory-efficient page generation

摘要

In one embodiment, a method comprising grouping by a processor primitives that comprise a scene into plural clusters, each cluster comprising a subset of the primitives that are proximal to each other relative to the other of the primitives; and allocating an equal size memory block for each respective cluster for the plural clusters, wherein all the plural clusters comprise one scene representation, wherein each cluster can contain up to M primitives, where M is an integer number.

主权项

1. A method, comprising:
grouping primitives that comprise a scene into plural pages, wherein each page comprises a subset of the scene primitives and an internal spatial index organizing the primitives of the page; organizing the pages of the scene within a top-level spatial index, wherein at least a portion of the leaf nodes of the top-level spatial index have references to one or more of the pages; organizing a multi-level caching storage system of the pages, including an optional cache level 3, wherein all of the pages of the scene are stored in external memory configured to store the data of all the pages, a cache level 2, allocated in a region of a host processor memory, wherein at least a portion of the pages from the cache level 3 is stored, and a cache level 1, allocated in a region of a graphics processing unit (GPU) memory, wherein at least a portion of the pages from the cache level 2 is stored, wherein an in-core page is one of the pages that is stored in the cache level 1 and an out-of-core page is one of the pages that is not stored in the cache level 1; maintaining information for the pages in at least one page table, wherein the information for each page comprises at least a counter indicating whether there are any available access requests for this page and an optional WasRead flag indicating whether this page was or was not previously tested for intersection; and performing a ray-primitive intersection search upon request to find intersections between rays and scene primitives using at least the top-level spatial index, the caching storage system and the page table.