A Mobile Accelerator Architecture for Ray Tracing

Mobile computing in the form of smart phones and tablets is becoming ubiquitous. As these devices are being used for increasingly sophisticated tasks, the graphics requirements are also increasing. With the growing desire for highly realistic graphics, the use of ray tracing for rendering will become essential. Ray tracing efficiently models complex illumination effects to improve visual realism in a very different way than current graphics accelerators, which use rasterization on SIMD hardware. Ray tracing also has some intriguing advantages in the mobile computing space where screen pixel counts are not likely to grow significantly, but scene size and complexity will continue to grow. We present a novel multi-core MIMD graphics accelerator architecture that is well suited to ray tracing on mobile platforms. Our architecture provides a large number of floating point resources and exploits thread-level parallelism to keep those units active during ray tracing. We show that a small-footprint version of this architecture is suitable for the mobile computing space, and has performance up to 13 times faster than an existing mobile graphics solution for ray tracing.