Packet Ray Tracing with the ARM NEON Architecture
Gustaf Waldemarson · Lund University Publications Student Papers (Lund University) · 2014
The ray tracing algorithm has long been used to create near photorealistic images and even simple ray tracers can simulate effects such as shadows, reflections and refractions where other methods struggle. Today, the state-of-the-art CPU ray tracers are typically those that are able to efficiently leverage datalevel parallelism at the instruction level by using SIMD extensions to allow the processor to trace multiple rays simultaneously, rather than one at a time. Within the ARM processor, the SIMD architecture is known as NEON and it is used to speed up data-parallel applications such as multimedia decoding and computer graphics. Thus, in this thesis we have investigated the implementation and performance of a ray tracer that utilizes the NEON architecture to trace packets of rays similar to modern ray tracing frameworks. To determine the efficiency of it we also developed a single-ray tracer as a reference and compared them in regard to both runtime and power consumption. In the end, we found that the optimized ray tracer scales better and performs around 150 – 300% better than the reference single-ray tracer.