FlexRender: A Distributed Rendering Architecture for Ray Tracing Huge Scenes on Commodity Hardware

Bob Somers, Zoë J. Wood

2013

Abstract

As the quest for more realistic computer graphics marches steadily on, the demand for rich and detailed imagery is greater than ever. However, the current "sweet spot" in terms of price, power consumption, and performance is in commodity hardware. If we desire to render scenes with tens or hundreds of millions of polygons as cheaply as possible, we need a way of doing so that maximizes the use of the commodity hardware that we already have at our disposal. We propose a distributed rendering architecture based on message-passing that is designed to partition scene geometry across a cluster of commodity machines, allowing the entire scene to remain in-core and enabling parallel construction of hierarchical spatial acceleration structures. The design uses feed-forward, asynchronous messages to allow distributed traversal of acceleration structures and evaluation of shaders without maintaining any suspended shader execution state. We also provide a simple method for throttling work generation to keep message queueing overhead small. The results of our implementation show roughly an order of magnitude speedup in rendering time compared to image plane decomposition, while keeping memory overhead for message queuing around 1%.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Somers B. and J. Wood Z. (2013). FlexRender: A Distributed Rendering Architecture for Ray Tracing Huge Scenes on Commodity Hardware . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications and International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2013) ISBN 978-989-8565-46-4, pages 152-164. DOI: 10.5220/0004289501520164

in Bibtex Style

@conference{grapp13,
author={Bob Somers and Zoë J. Wood},
title={FlexRender: A Distributed Rendering Architecture for Ray Tracing Huge Scenes on Commodity Hardware},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications and International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2013)},
year={2013},
pages={152-164},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004289501520164},
isbn={978-989-8565-46-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications and International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications - Volume 1: GRAPP, (VISIGRAPP 2013)
TI - FlexRender: A Distributed Rendering Architecture for Ray Tracing Huge Scenes on Commodity Hardware
SN - 978-989-8565-46-4
AU - Somers B.
AU - J. Wood Z.
PY - 2013
SP - 152
EP - 164
DO - 10.5220/0004289501520164