An efficient hybrid ray tracing and rasterizer architecture for mobile GPU
Won‐Jong Lee, Seok Joong Hwang, Youngsam Shin, Jeong-Joon Yoo, Soojung Ryu · 2015
We present a bandwidth- and energy-efficient, hybrid ray tracing and rasterizer architecture for tile-based mobile GPU. In order to successfully commercialize mobile System on Chip (SoC), including ray tracing hardware solution, effective integration with rasterizer based on OpenGL---ES is indispensable for the performance and compatibility reason. Thus, recently, the traditional rasterizer-ray tracing hybrid approach is revisited to achieve this goal. The key factor for hybrid rendering is to reflect the fundamental principle of tile-based rendering on integrating the ray tracing hardware and mobile GPUs. Consequently, we propose a new architecture for hybrid rendering by combining new three features such as extended tile binning unit, tile prefetch, and per-tile power control. Simulation results show that our architecture is a potentially versatile solution for future mobile GPUs in low-energy devices because it provides as much as 31.7% better G-buffer bandwidth utilization and is up to 2.18 times better performance per unit energy compared to the ray tracing hardware-only solution.