Abstract

RIVERA-ALVARADO, Ernesto  and  ZAMORA-MADRIGAL, Julio. An evaluation of Kd-Trees vs Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) acceleration structures in modern CPU architectures. Tecnología en Marcha [online]. 2023, vol.36, n.2, pp.86-98. ISSN 0379-3982.  http://dx.doi.org/10.18845/tm.v36i2.6098.

Ray tracing is a rendering technique that is highly praised for its realism and image quality. Nonetheless, this is a computationally intensive task that is slow compared to other rendering techniques like rasterization. Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) is a primitive subdivision acceleration mechanism that is the mainly used method for accelerating ray tracing in modern solutions. It is regarded as having better performance against other acceleration methods. Another well-known technique is Kd-Trees that uses binary space partitioning to adaptively subdivide space with planes. In this research, we made an up-to-date evaluation of both acceleration structures, using state-of-the-art BVH and Kd-Trees algorithms implemented in C, and found out that the Kd-Trees acceleration structure provided better performance in all defined scenarios on a modern x86 CPU architecture.

Keywords : Ray tracing; CPU; estructuras de aceleración; hardware moderno; BVH; Kd-Trees, jerarquía de volúmenes limítrofes.

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