HPG Paper Preprint: Using RTX cores for something other than ray tracing….

Hey – just a quick heads-up: our HPG (short) paper on using RTX cores for something other than ray tracing got accepted; and for everybody interested in that I just uploaded a “author’s preprint” (ie, without the final edits) to my usual publications page (at http://www.sci.utah.edu/Publications).

The core idea of this paper was to play with the idea of “now that we have this ‘free’ hardware for tracing rays, what else can we use it for, in applications that wouldn’t otherwise use these units?” – after all, the hardware is already there, it’s actually doing some non-trivial tree traversal, it’s massively powerful (billions of such tree traversals per second!), and if it’s not otherwise being used then pretty much anything you can offload to it is a win… (and yes, pretty much the first thing we tried worked out well).

For this paper we only looked into one such applications (point location, in a tet mesh volume renderer), just as a “proof of concept” … but yes, there’s a ton more where it’d make sense: I already used it for some AMR rendering, too (same basic concept), but there’s sure to be more. If you play with it and find some interesting uses, let me know – I’m curious to see what others will do with it!

Hope you’ll like it – this has been a lot of fun, hope you’ll enjoy reading it, too…

PS:

Preprint here: http://www.sci.utah.edu/Publications

Full citation: RTX Beyond Ray Tracing – Exploring the Use of Hardware Ray Tracing Cores for Tet-Mesh Point Location, Ingo Wald, Will Usher, Nathan Morrical, Laura L Lediaev, and Valerio Pascucci, Proceedings of High Performance Graphics (HPG) 2019. (to appear).