Raycore
RayCore: A ray-tracing hardware architecture for mobile devices
Jae-Ho Nah1,3,4,5, Hyuck-Joo Kwon1, Dong-Seok Kim1, Cheol-Ho Jeong2, Jinhong Park3,
Tack-Don Han4, Dinesh Manocha5, and Woo-Chan Park1
1Sejong University, 2Siliconarts, 3LG Electronics, 4Yonsei University,
5University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
We present RayCore, a mobile ray-tracing hardware architecture. RayCore facilitates high-quality rendering effects, such as reflection, refraction, and shadows, on mobile devices by performing real-time Whitted ray tracing. RayCore consists of two major components: ray-tracing units (RTUs) based on a unified traversal and intersection pipeline and a tree-building unit (TBU) for dynamic scenes. The overall RayCore architecture offers considerable benefits in terms of die area, memory access, and power consumption. We have evaluated our architecture based on FPGA and ASIC evaluations and demonstrate its performance on different benchmarks. According to the results, our architecture demonstrates high performance per unit area and unit energy, making it highly suitable for use in mobile devices.
