Compact Tetrahedralization-based Acceleration Structure for Ray Tracing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a compact tetrahedral mesh representation and an efficient GPU-based traversal algorithm that enhances ray-tracing performance, outperforming existing tetrahedral methods and rivaling k-d trees and BVHs.

Contribution

It presents a novel tetrahedral mesh reordering technique and a GPU-optimized traversal algorithm, improving cache efficiency and ray-tracing speed.

Findings

Outperforms existing tetrahedral traversal methods

Achieves comparable performance to k-d trees and BVHs

Demonstrates efficiency improvements through GPU implementation

Abstract

We propose a compact and efficient tetrahedral mesh representation to improve the ray-tracing performance. We reorder tetrahedral mesh data using a space-filling curve to improve cache locality. Most importantly, we propose an efficient ray traversal algorithm. We provide details of common ray tracing operations on tetrahedral meshes and give the GPU implementation of our traversal method. We demonstrate our findings through a set of comprehensive experiments. Our method outperforms existing tetrahedral mesh-based traversal methods and yields comparable results to the traversal methods based on the state of the art acceleration structures such as k-dimensional (k-d) trees and Bounding Volume Hierarchies (BVHs).