Data parallelization of Kd-tree ray tracing on the Cell Broadband Engine

Ray tracing is a widely used rendering technique in computer graphics, and its intense computational requirement prohibits real-time ray tracing applications wide use in consumer markets. One main feature of ray tracing is parallelism and the mainstream computer market is switching to systems with multi-core. In this paper, in order to accelerate ray tracing to achieve real-time processing, we propose a data parallel kd-tree ray tracing algorithm on cell broadband engine (Cell/B.E.) which is a state-of-the-art multi-core processor. This paper expounds the feasibility and key issues of kd-tree ray tracing on the Cell/B.E. processor and introduces the implementation and cell-specific in ray tracing program design. The results highlight that our parallel algorithm for kd-tree ray tracing is scalable with a matrix of cores, resolutions or different object models. The execution time reduces from several minutes to several seconds.