Authors:
Biagio Cosenza
1
;
Carsten Dachsbacher
2
and
Ugo Erra
3
Affiliations:
1
Universität Innsbruck, Austria
;
2
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
;
3
Università della Basilicata, Italy
Keyword(s):
Ray Tracing, Image-based Techniques, Parallel Rendering, GPU.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
High-Performance Computing and Parallel Rendering
;
Real-Time Rendering
;
Rendering
;
Systems and Software Architectures for Rendering
Abstract:
Interactive ray tracing has seen enormous progress in recent years. However, advanced rendering techniques requiring many million rays per second are still not feasible at interactive speed, and are only possible by means of highly parallel ray tracing. When using compute clusters, good load balancing is crucial in order to fully exploit the available computational power, and to not suffer from the overhead involved by synchronization barriers. In this paper, we present a novel GPU method to compute a cost map: a per-pixel cost estimate of the ray tracing rendering process. We show that the cost map is a powerful tool to improve load balancing in parallel ray tracing, and it can be used for adaptive task partitioning and enhanced dynamic load balancing. Its effectiveness has been proven in a parallel ray tracer implementation tailored for a cluster of workstations.