Piko: A Design Framework for Programmable Graphics Pipelines

TL;DR

Piko is a flexible framework that simplifies designing, optimizing, and retargeting graphics pipelines across architectures, enabling efficient, real-time rendering with customizable stage configurations.

Contribution

It introduces a programmable framework and compiler that allow flexible, optimized graphics pipeline implementations on diverse hardware architectures.

Findings

Supports a wide range of pipelines including rasterization and ray tracing

Achieves real-time performance within a factor of six of state-of-the-art systems

Enables quick exploration of design tradeoffs through configurable spatial binning

Abstract

We present Piko, a framework for designing, optimizing, and retargeting implementations of graphics pipelines on multiple architectures. Piko programmers express a graphics pipeline by organizing the computation within each stage into spatial bins and specifying a scheduling preference for these bins. Our compiler, Pikoc, compiles this input into an optimized implementation targeted to a massively-parallel GPU or a multicore CPU. Piko manages work granularity in a programmable and flexible manner, allowing programmers to build load-balanced parallel pipeline implementations, to exploit spatial and producer-consumer locality in a pipeline implementation, and to explore tradeoffs between these considerations. We demonstrate that Piko can implement a wide range of pipelines, including rasterization, Reyes, ray tracing, rasterization/ray tracing hybrid, and deferred rendering. Piko allows us to implement efficient graphics pipelines with relative ease and to quickly explore design alternatives by modifying the spatial binning configurations and scheduling preferences for individual stages, all while delivering real-time performance that is within a factor six of state-of-the-art rendering systems.