Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science

Abstract

dissertationRay tracing is becoming more widely adopted in offline rendering systems due to its natural support for high quality lighting. Since quality is also a concern in most real time systems, we believe ray tracing would be a welcome change in the real time world, but is avoided due to insufficient performance. Since power consumption is one of the primary factors limiting the increase of processor performance, it must be addressed as a foremost concern in any future ray tracing system designs. This will require cooperating advances in both algorithms and architecture. In this dissertation I study ray tracing system designs from a data movement perspective, targeting the various memory resources that are the primary consumer of power on a modern processor. The result is high performance, low energy ray tracing architectures