Fast Hierarchy Operations on GPU Architectures

Christian Lauterbach, Qi Mo, Min Tang and Dinesh Manocha
1
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill


Abstract
We present fast parallel algorithms to construct, update and traverse
bounding volume hierarchies on many-core GPUs. Our approach is
general and based on a new work distribution scheme that can easily
adapt to dynamically changing work loads that arise in interactive
applications. This enables us to exploit all cores to perform hierarchical
operations using tight-fitting OBBs with little overhead
as compared to widely-used AABBs. We use our fast hierarchy
refitting for interactive ray tracing and collision detection on complex
and deforming models such as the problem of self-collision. In
practice, we observe more than an order of magnitude improvement
in the performance of continuous collision queries as compared
to prior GPU-based algorithms, competitive or better performance
compared to multi-core CPU methods, and much higher speed for
hierarchy refitting with applications to ray tracing.


Paper
 
Fast Hierarchy Operations on GPU Architectures
(PDF)
Tech report, April 2009, UNC Chapel Hill


Video


Related Links

GAMMA Research Group
Ray Tracing Research at GAMMA


Acknowledgements

NVIDIA
RDECOM
NSF
ARO
DARPA

Models courtesy of Disney Animation.