research-article

Vectorized production path tracing

Authors:

Eric TabellionAuthors Info & Claims

HPG '17: Proceedings of High Performance Graphics

Article No.: 10, Pages 1 - 11

https://doi.org/10.1145/3105762.3105768

Published: 28 July 2017 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents MoonRay, a high performance production rendering architecture using Monte Carlo path tracing developed at DreamWorks Animation. MoonRay is the first production path tracer, to our knowledge, designed to fully leverage Single Instruction/Multiple Data (SIMD) vector units throughout. To achieve high SIMD efficiency, we employ Embree for tracing rays and vectorize the remaining compute intensive components of the renderer: the integrator, the shading system and shaders, and the texturing engine. Queuing is used to help keep all vector lanes full and improve data coherency. We use the ISPC programming language [Intel 2011; Pharr and Mark 2012] to achieve improved performance across SSE, AVX/AVX2 and AVX512 instruction sets. Our system includes two functionally equivalent uni-directional CPU path tracing implementations: a C++ scalar depth-first version and an ISPC vectorized breadth-first wavefront version. Using side by side performance comparisons on complex production scenes and assets we show our vectorized architecture, running on AVX2, delivers between a 1.3× to 2.3× speed-up in overall render time, and up to 3×, 6×, and 4×, speed-ups within the integration, shading, and texturing components, respectively.

References

[1]

Mike Acton. 2014. Data-Oriented Design and C++. (2014). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc.

[2]

Attila T. Áfra, Carsten Benthin, Ingo Wald, and Jacob Munkberg. 2016. Local Shading Coherence Extraction for SIMD-efficient Path Tracing on CPUs. In Proceedings of High Performance Graphics (HPG '16). 119--128.

Digital Library

[3]

Timo Aila and Tero Karras. 2010. Architecture Considerations for Tracing Incoherent Rays. In Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics (HPG '10). 113--122.

Digital Library

[4]

Carsten Benthin, Ingo Wald, Sven Woop, Manfred Ernst, and William R. Mark. 2012. Combining Single and Packet-Ray Tracing for Arbitrary Ray Distributions on the Intel MIC Architecture. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2012), 1438--1448.

Digital Library

[5]

Robert L. Cook, Loren Carpenter, and Edwin Catmull. 1987. The Reyes Image Rendering Architecture. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH '87). 95--102.

Digital Library

[6]

Christian Eisenacher, Gregory Nichols, Andrew Selle, and Brent Burley. 2013. Sorted Deferred Shading for Production Path Tracing. In Proceedings of the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (EGSR '13). 125--132.

Digital Library

[7]

Manfred Ernst and Gunther Greiner. 2008. Multi Bounding Volume Hierarchies. In IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing (RT '08).

[8]

Kirill Garanzha and Charles Loop. 2010. Fast Ray Sorting and Breadth-First Packet Traversal for GPU Ray Tracing. Computer Graphics Forum (2010), 289--298.

[9]

Larry Gritz. 2007. Open Image I/O. https://github.com/OpenImageIO/oiio/.

[10]

Jim Handy. 1998. The Cache Memory Book. Morgan Kaufmann. https://www.elsevier.com/books/cache-memory-book-the/handy/978-0-08-051878-7.

Digital Library

[11]

P Hanrahan. 1986. Using Caching and Breadth-first Search to Speed Up Ray-tracing. In Proceedings on Graphics Interface '86/Vision Interface '86. 56--61.

Digital Library

[12]

Jared Hoberock, Victor Lu, Yuntao Jia, and John C. Hart. 2009. Stream Compaction for Deferred Shading. In Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics 2009 (HPG '09). 173--180.

Digital Library

[13]

Sony Imageworks. 2017. Alembic. (2017). http://www.alembic.io/.

[14]

Intel. 2010. Threading Building Blocks. https://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/.

[15]

Intel. 2011. Intel SPMD Program Compiler. https://ispc.github.io/.

[16]

James T. Kajiya. 1986. The Rendering Equation. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH '86). 143--150.

Digital Library

[17]

Alexander Keller, Carsten Wächter, Matthias Raab, Daniel Seibert, Dietger van Antwerpen, Johann Korndörfer, and Lutz Kettner. 2017. The Iray Light Transport Simulation and Rendering System. CoRR abs/1705.01263 (2017). http://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01263

[18]

Janne Kontkanen, Eric Tabellion, and Ryan S. Overbeck. 2011. Coherent Out-of-core Point-based Global Illumination. In Proceedings of the Twenty-second Eurographics Conference on Rendering (EGSR '11). 1353--1360.

Digital Library

[19]

Samuli Laine, Tero Karras, and Timo Aila. 2013. Megakernels Considered Harmful: Wavefront Path Tracing on GPUs. In Proceedings of the 5th High-Performance Graphics Conference (HPG '13). 137--143.

Digital Library

[20]

Koji Nakamaru and Yoshio Ohno. 2002. Ray Tracing for Curve Primitives. In Proceedings of Winter School of Computer Graphics (WSCG).

[21]

Jacopo Pantaleoni, Luca Fascione, Martin Hill, and Timo Aila. 2010. PantaRay: Fast Ray-traced Occlusion Caching of Massive Scenes. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 Papers (SIGGRAPH '10). 37:1--37:10.

Digital Library

[22]

Steven G. Parker, James Bigler, Andreas Dietrich, Heiko Friedrich, Jared Hoberock, David Luebke, David McAllister, Morgan McGuire, Keith Morley, Austin Robison, and Martin Stich. 2010. OptiX: A General Purpose Ray Tracing Engine. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2010 Papers (SIGGRAPH '10). 66:1--66:13.

Digital Library

[23]

Matt Pharr, Wenzel Jakob, and Greg Humphreys. 2016. Physically Based Rendering, 3rd ed. Morgan Kaufmann. http://www.pbrt.org/.

Digital Library

[24]

Matt Pharr, Craig Kolb, Reid Gershbein, and Pat Hanrahan. 1997. Rendering Complex Scenes with Memory-coherent Ray Tracing. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH '97). 101--108.

Digital Library

[25]

M. Pharr and W. R. Mark. 2012. ispc: A SPMD Compiler for High-Performance CPU Programming. In 2012 Innovative Parallel Computing (InPar). 1--13.

[26]

Mike Seymour. 2014. UDIM UV mapping. (2014). https://www.fxguide.com/featured/udim-uv-mapping/.

[27]

John A. Tsakok. 2009. Faster Incoherent Rays: Multi-BVH Ray Stream Tracing. In Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics 2009 (HPG '09). 151--158.

Digital Library

[28]

Eric Veach and Leonidas J. Guibas. 1995. Optimally Combining Sampling Techniques for Monte Carlo Rendering. In Proceedings of the 22Nd Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH '95). 419--428.

Digital Library

[29]

Jiří Vorba and Jaroslav Křivánek. 2016. Adjoint-Driven Russian Roulette and Splitting in Light Transport Simulation. ACM Trans. Graph. (2016), 1--11.

Digital Library

[30]

Ingo Wald. 2007. On Fast Construction of SAH-based Bounding Volume Hierarchies. In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing (RT '07). 33--40.

Digital Library

[31]

Ingo Wald, Carsten Benthin, and Solomon Boulos. 2008. Getting rid of packets - Efficient SIMD single-ray traversal using multi-branching BVHs. In IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing (RT '08).

[32]

Ingo Wald, Sven Woop, Carsten Benthin, Gregory S. Johnson, and Manfred Ernst. 2014. Embree: A Kernel Framework for Efficient CPU Ray Tracing. ACM Trans. Graph. (2014), 143:1--143:8.

Digital Library

[33]

Sven Woop, Carsten Benthin, Ingo Wald, Gregory S. Johnson, and Eric Tabellion. 2014. Exploiting Local Orientation Similarity for Efficient Ray Traversal of Hair and Fur. In Proceedings of High Performance Graphics (HPG '14). 41--49.

Digital Library

Cited By

Stein CHellmuth CConty Estevez ALecocq PGritz L(2024)Spear: Across the Streaming Multiprocessors: Porting a Production Renderer to the GPUProceedings of the 2024 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3665320.3670988(1-9)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3665320.3670988
Pharr MWronski BSalvi MFajardo M(2024)Filtering After Shading With Stochastic Texture FilteringProceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques10.1145/36512937:1(1-20)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651293
Czerninski ISchechner Y(2023)PARS - Path recycling and sorting for efficient cloud tomographyIntelligent Computing10.34133/icomputing.00072Online publication date: 8-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.34133/icomputing.0007
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Vectorized production path tracing
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Computer graphics
    1. Rendering
      1. Ray tracing

Recommendations

RenderMan: An Advanced Path-Tracing Architecture for Movie Rendering
Special Issue On Production Rendering and Regular Papers

Pixar’s RenderMan renderer is used to render all of Pixar’s films and by many film studios to render visual effects for live-action movies. RenderMan started as a scanline renderer based on the Reyes algorithm, and it was extended over the years with ...
Importance of explicit vectorization for CPU and GPU software performance

Much of the current focus in high-performance computing is on multi-threading, multi-computing, and graphics processing unit (GPU) computing. However, vectorization and non-parallel optimization techniques, which can often be employed additionally, are ...
Acceleration of Blender Cycles Path-Tracing Engine Using Intel Many Integrated Core Architecture
Computer Information Systems and Industrial Management
Abstract
This paper describes the acceleration of the most computationally intensive kernels of the Blender rendering engine, Blender Cycles, using Intel Many Integrated Core architecture (MIC). The proposed parallelization, which uses OpenMP technology, ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

HPG '17: Proceedings of High Performance Graphics

July 2017

180 pages

ISBN:9781450351010

DOI:10.1145/3105762

General Chairs:
Morgan McGuire
Williams College
,
Anjul Patney
NVIDIA

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGGRAPH: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
EUROGRAPHICS: The European Association for Computer Graphics

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 July 2017

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

HPG '17

Sponsor:

SIGGRAPH
EUROGRAPHICS

HPG '17: High-Performance Graphics

July 28 - 30, 2017

California, Los Angeles

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 15 of 44 submissions, 34%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

12
Total Citations
View Citations
392
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)40
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4

Reflects downloads up to 10 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Stein CHellmuth CConty Estevez ALecocq PGritz L(2024)Spear: Across the Streaming Multiprocessors: Porting a Production Renderer to the GPUProceedings of the 2024 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3665320.3670988(1-9)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3665320.3670988
Pharr MWronski BSalvi MFajardo M(2024)Filtering After Shading With Stochastic Texture FilteringProceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques10.1145/36512937:1(1-20)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651293
Czerninski ISchechner Y(2023)PARS - Path recycling and sorting for efficient cloud tomographyIntelligent Computing10.34133/icomputing.00072Online publication date: 8-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.34133/icomputing.0007
Zheng SZhou ZChen XYan DZhang CGeng YGu YXu K(2022)LuisaRenderACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3550454.355546341:6(1-19)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3550454.3555463
Jakob WSpeierer SRoussel NVicini D(2022)DR.JITACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3528223.353009941:4(1-19)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3528223.3530099
Xie FMishchuk PHunt W(2021)Real Time Cluster Path TracingSIGGRAPH Asia 2021 Technical Communications10.1145/3478512.3488605(1-4)Online publication date: 14-Dec-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3478512.3488605
Hu YLi TAnderson LRagan-Kelley JDurand F(2019)TaichiACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3355089.335650638:6(1-16)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2019
https://doi.org/10.1145/3355089.3356506
Nimier-David MVicini DZeltner TJakob W(2019)Mitsuba 2ACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3355089.335649838:6(1-17)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3355089.3356498
Gerveshi ALooper SKao SBalents BRoy TRose R(2019)Distributed multi-context interactive renderingProceedings of the 2019 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3329715.3338878(1-3)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3329715.3338878
Reshetov ALuebke D(2018)Phantom Ray-Hair IntersectorProceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques10.1145/32333071:2(1-22)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3233307
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents