Towards multi-kernel ray tracing for GPUs

Ray tracing is a widely used algorithm to compute images with high visual quality. Mapping ray tracing computations to massively parallel hardware architectures in an efficient manner is a difficult task. Based on an analysis of current ray tracing algorithms on GPUs, a new ray traversal scheme called batch tracing is proposed. It decomposes the task into multiple kernels, each of which is designed for efficient execution. Our algorithm achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art approaches and represents a promising avenue for future research.