Grid Acceleration Structure for Efficiently Tracing the Secondary Rays in Dynamic Scenes on Mobile Platforms

Woong Seo, Byeongjun Choi, Insung Ihm

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2017.44.6.573

Despite the recent remarkable advances in the computing power of mobile devices, the heat and battery problems still restrict their performances, particularly compared to PCs. Therefore, in the application of the ray-tracing technique for high-quality rendering, the consideration of a method that traces only the secondary rays while the effects of the primary rays are generated through rasterization-based OpenGL ES rendering is worthwhile. Given that most of the rendering time is for the secondary-ray processing in such a method, a new volume-grid technique for dynamic scenes that enhances the tracing performance of the secondary rays with a low coherence is proposed here. The proposed method attempts to model all of the possible spatial secondary rays in a fixed number of sampling rays, thereby alleviating the visitation problem regarding all of the cells along the ray in a uniform grid. Also, a hybrid rendering pipeline that speeds up the overall rendering performance by exploiting the mobile-device CPU and GPU is presented.