SGRT: A Mobile GPU Architecture for Real-Time Ray Tracing Won-Jong Lee† ∗ Youngsam Shin † Jaedon Lee † Jin-Woo Kim ‡ Jae-Ho Nah§

Figure 1: Full ray traced (including shading and bilinear filtered texturing) scenes by our GPU on a FPGA platform: Ferrari (left, 210K triangles) and Fairy (right, 170K triangles). Recently, with the increasing demand for photorealistic graphics and the rapid advances in desktop CPUs/GPUs, real-time ray trac-ing has attracted considerable attention. Unfortunately, ray tracing in the current mobile environment is very difficult because of in-adequate computing power, memory bandwidth, and flexibility in mobile GPUs. In this paper, we present a novel mobile GPU archi-tecture called SGRT (Samsung reconfigurable GPU based on Ray Tracing) in which a fast compact hardware accelerator and a flex-ible programmable shader are combined. SGRT has two key fea-tures: 1) an area-efficient parallel pipelined traversal unit; and 2) flexible and high-performance kernels for shading and ray genera-tion. 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 sys-tem is implemented on an FPGA platform, and mobile ray tracing is successfully demonstrated