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> software-accelerated ray tracing Is this a particular term/concept, or do you just mean non-hardware-accelerated ray tracing? If the former, what does it me
by Cyberdog 5y ago
> software-accelerated ray tracing
Is this a particular term/concept, or do you just mean non-hardware-accelerated ray tracing?
If the former, what does it mean for something to be "software-accelerated?"
If the latter, I apologize if this comes off as nit-picking.
- smoldesu 5y agoWhen I say software-accelerated, I'm referring to anything that doesn't offload any rendering processes to the GPU. It's not necessarily a turn of phrase, but I think most people familiar with the topic will grok that software rendering = no GPU offload. Though I do understand the desire to be pedantic, because ISAs like this and their SIMD instructions can kinda blur the lines between what constitutes as "hardware accelerated". That's why I try to avoid it as much as possible for the sake of simplicity.
- tralarpa 5y agoI think parent was wondering what the word "accelated" in "software-accelerated" could mean. Faster than what? (faster doing the calculations by hand? :)
- dragontamer 5y agoThe concept of "accelerating" raytracing operations on a CPU makes almost no sense. GPUs require acceleration because the memory latency on GPUs is pretty large, caches are small, and GPUs have such huge compute that waiting around for the "next = bvh-tree->left" operation takes a huge amount of time. By making dedicated acceleration structures and hardware, that latency can be mitigated, and the huge compute capabilities of GPUs can be unleashed. ---------- In contrast, CPUs are already really good (relatively) at pointer-dereferencing loops. CPUs have less compute and more memory-optimizations (relative to a GPU anyway).