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Fast BVH Construction on GPUs
Author(s) -
Lauterbach C.,
Garland M.,
Sengupta S.,
Luebke D.,
Manocha D.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01377.x
Subject(s) - computer science , scalability , parallel computing , tree traversal , bounding overwatch , multi core processor , bottleneck , ray tracing (physics) , cuda , construct (python library) , heuristic , implementation , tracing , bounding volume , algorithm , collision detection , collision , programming language , artificial intelligence , physics , quantum mechanics , embedded system , database
We present two novel parallel algorithms for rapidly constructing bounding volume hierarchies on manycore GPUs. The first uses a linear ordering derived from spatial Morton codes to build hierarchies extremely quickly and with high parallel scalability. The second is a top‐down approach that uses the surface area heuristic (SAH) to build hierarchies optimized for fast ray tracing. Both algorithms are combined into a hybrid algorithm that removes existing bottlenecks in the algorithm for GPU construction performance and scalability leading to significantly decreased build time. The resulting hierarchies are close in to optimized SAH hierarchies, but the construction process is substantially faster, leading to a significant net benefit when both construction and traversal cost are accounted for. Our preliminary results show that current GPU architectures can compete with CPU implementations of hierarchy construction running on multicore systems. In practice, we can construct hierarchies of models with up to several million triangles and use them for fast ray tracing or other applications.