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.