CrossRT: A cross platform programming technology for hardware-accelerated ray tracing in CG and CV applications

TL;DR

CrossRT is a programming technology that enables cross-platform, hardware-accelerated ray tracing in computer graphics and computer vision, simplifying development and ensuring high performance across different hardware and APIs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel translator that converts hardware-agnostic C++ algorithms into optimized, hardware-specific code for ray tracing applications, supporting multiple kernels and fallbacks.

Findings

Generated code is comparable to expert GPU implementations.

Outperforms existing Path Tracing solutions.

Supports flexible kernel configurations and fallbacks.

Abstract

We propose a programming technology that bridges cross-platform compatibility and hardware acceleration in ray tracing applications. Our methodology enables developers to define algorithms while our translator manages implementation specifics for different hardware or APIs. Features include: generating hardware-accelerated code from hardware-agnostic, object-oriented C++ algorithm descriptions; enabling users to define software fallbacks for non-hardware-accelerated CPUs and GPUs; producing GPU programming API-based algorithm implementations resembling manually ported C++ versions. The generated code is editable and readable, allowing for additional hardware acceleration. Our translator supports single megakernel and multiple kernel path tracing implementations without altering the programming model or input source code. Wavefront mode is crucial for NeRF and SDF, ensuring efficient evaluation with multiple kernels. Validation on tasks such as BVH tree build/traversal, ray-surface intersection for SDF, ray-volume intersection for 3D Gaussian Splatting, and complex Path Tracing models showed comparable performance levels to expert-written implementations for GPUs. Our technology outperformed existing Path Tracing implementations.