Efficient multi-kernel ray tracing for GPUs

Images with high visual quality are often generated by a ray tracing algorithm. Despite its conceptual simplicity, designing an efficient mapping of ray tracing computations to massively parallel hardware architectures is a challenging task. In this paper we investigate the performance of state-of-the-art ray traversal algorithms for bounding volume hierarchies on GPUs and discuss their potentials and limitations. Based on this analysis, a novel ray traversal scheme called batch tracing is proposed. It decomposes the task into multiple kernels, each of which is designed for efficient parallel execution. Our algorithm achieves comparable performance to currently prevailing approaches and represents a promising avenue for future research.