Seok-yoon Jung

SGRT: a mobile GPU architecture for real-time ray tracing

Recently, with the increasing demand for photorealistic graphics and the rapid advances in desktop CPUs/GPUs, real-time ray tracing has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, ray tracing in the current mobile environment is very difficult because of inadequate computing power, memory bandwidth, and flexibility in mobile GPUs. In this paper, we present a novel mobile GPU architecture called SGRT (Samsung reconfigurable GPU based on Ray Tracing) in which a fast compact hardware accelerator and a flexible programmable shader are combined. SGRT has two key features: 1) an area-efficient parallel pipelined traversal unit; and 2) flexible and high-performance kernels for shading and ray generation. Simulation results show that SGRT is potentially a versatile graphics solution for future application processors as it provides a real-time ray tracing performance at full HD resolution that can compete with that of existing desktop GPU ray tracers. Our system is implemented on an FPGA platform, and mobile ray tracing is successfully demonstrated.

SGRT: a scalable mobile GPU architecture based on ray tracing

Recently, with the increasing demand for photorealistic graphics and the rapid advances in desktop CPUs/GPUs, real-time raytracing has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, raytracing in the current mobile environment is difficult because of inadequate computing power, memory bandwidth, and flexibility in mobile GPUs. In this work, we present a novel mobile GPU architecture called the SGRT (Samsung reconfigurable GPU based on RayTracing) by enhancing our previous works with the following features: 1) a fast compact hardware engine that accelerates a traversal and intersection operation, 2) a flexible reconfigurable processor that supports software ray generation and shading, and 3) a parallelization framework that achieves scalable performance. Unlike our previous work, the current architecture is designed for both static and dynamic scenes with a smaller area. Experimental results show that the SGRT can be a versatile graphics solution, as it supports compatible performance compared to desktop GPU raytracers. To the best of our knowledge, the SGRT is the first mobile GPU based on full Whitted raytracing.

Selective and adaptive supersampling for real-time ray tracing

While supersampling is an essential element for high quality rendering, high sampling rates, routinely employed in offline rendering, are still considered quite burdensome for real-time ray tracing. In this paper, we propose a selective and adaptive supersampling technique aimed at the development of a real-time ray tracer on todays many-core processors. For efficient utilization of very precious computing time, this technique explores both image---space and object---space attributes, which can be easily gathered during the ray tracing computation, minimizing rendering artifacts by cleverly distributing ray samples to rendering elements according to priorities that are selectively set by a user. Our implementation on the current GPU demonstrates that the presented algorithm makes high sampling rates as effective as 9 to 16 samples per pixel more affordable than before for real-time ray tracing.

A novel mobile GPU architecture based on ray tracing

Recently, with the increasing demand for photorealistic graphics and the rapid advances in desktop CPUs/GPUs, real-time ray tracing has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, ray tracing in the current mobile environment is difficult because of inadequate computing power, memory bandwidth, and flexibility in mobile GPUs. In this paper, we present a novel mobile GPU architecture called the SGRT (Samsung reconfigurable GPU based on Ray Tracing) with the following features: 1) a fast compact hardware engine that accelerates a traversal and intersection operation, 2) a flexible reconfigurable processor that supports software ray generation and shading, and 3) a parallelization framework that achieves scalable performance. Experimental results show that the SGRT can be a versatile graphics solution, as it supports compatible performance compared to desktop GPU ray tracers.

Path rendering using winding number generator

In this paper, we propose a computing intensive path rendering scheme. Because legacy path rendering schemes are memory I/O bound they are not suitable to the high resolution display. To do so, we propose to use winding number generator which generates per pixel winding number in parallel manner. When we use the winding number generator, computing latency (cycles) for path rendering are reduced into about 22%.

Path rendering for high resolution mobile device

In this paper, we present a novel path rendering scheme that provides a fast rendering on high resolution mobile device. Because legacy path renderings are memory intensive work, they do not provide enough performance (fps) on high resolution display. To get an acceptable performance, we propose a novel approach for path rendering. Our design policies for the path rendering are two folds: 1) Minimize memory I/O, 2) Highly parallel computational scheme. We propose to use winding number generator for per-pixel winding number calculation which does not require memory intensive activity. Because our scheme effectively reduces memory I/O and it is executed with highly parallel manner, we can get an acceptable high performance on high resolution mobile device.

Tile binning algorithm for vector graphics minimizing false overlap

In this paper, we present an efficient tile binning algorithm that reduces false overlap area for the Bezier curve. To do so, we propose a Multiple-Bounding Box (MBB) enclosing a Bezier curve with multiple bounding boxes. Experimental comparisons of MBB and legacy methods show that the proposed MBB method reduces 16~35% memory overhead. It also reduces 23~54% CPU latency overhead in a tile-based 2D graphics pipeline.

Tile boundary sharing for tile-based vector graphics rendering

In this paper, we present an efficient curve rasterization method that effectively reduces duplicated computations in a tile-based rendering. To do so, Tile Boundary Sharing (TBS) method is proposed that shares boundary information between neighbor tiles. When we use the TBS, computing cycles for tile-based vector graphics are reduced into 21~34%.