Embree Siggraph 2016 Final

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Embree ray tracing kernels: overview and new

features
Conference Paper · July 2016

DOI: 10.1145/2897839.2927450
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Embree Ray Tracing Kernels:
Overview and New Features
Attila Áfra, Ingo Wald, Carsten Benthin, Sven Woop
Intel Corporation
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Intel does not guarantee the availability, functionality, or effectiveness of any optimization on microprocessors not
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2
© 2016 Intel Corporation
Writing a fast ray tracer is difficult
 Need to multi-thread: easy for rendering but difficult for hierarchy
construction
 Need to vectorize: efficient use of SIMD units, different ISAs (SSE, AVX, AVX2,
AVX-512)
 Need deep domain knowledge: many different data structures (kd-trees,
octrees, grids, BVH2, BVH4, ..., hybrid structures) and algorithms (single rays,
packets, large packets, stream tracing, ...) to choose
 Need to support different CPUs: different ISAs/CPU types favor different data
structures, data layouts, and algorithms
3
Embree ray tracing kernels
 Provides highly optimized and scalable ray tracing kernels
 Acceleration structure build and ray traversal
 Targets professional rendering applications
 Highest ray tracing performance on CPUs
 1.5–6× speedup reported by users
 Support for latest CPUs
 Intel® Xeon Phi™ Processor (codenamed Knights Landing)
 API for easy integration into applications
 Free and open source under Apache 2.0 license
 http://embree.github.com
4
Embree features
 Find closest hit, any hit
 rtcIntersect, rtcOccluded
 Single rays, ray packets (4, 8, 16), ray streams (N)
 High-quality and high-performance BVH builders
 Intel® SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) support
 Triangles, quads, subdivs, instances, hair, linear motion blur
 Extensible
 User defined geometry, intersection filter functions, open source
 Support for Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB)
5
Embree system overview
Embree API (C++ and ISPC)
Ray Tracing Kernel Selection
Acceleration Builders Subdiv Engine Traversal Intersection

Structures
SAH Builder B-Spline Patch Single Ray Möller-Trumbore
Spatial Split Builder Gregory Patch Plücker
bvh4.triangle4 Packet/Hybrid
Morton Builder Tessellation Cache Bézier Curve
bvh8.triangle4 Displ. Mapping Ray Stream Line Segment
BVH Refitter
bvh4.quad4v Triangle Grid
…
Common Vector and SIMD Library

(Vec3f, Vec3fa, vfloat4, vfloat8, vfloat16, …, SSE2, SSE4.1, AVX, AVX2, AVX-512)
6
Embree API
How to use Embree?
7
Scene
// include Embree headers
 Scene is a container for set of #include <embree2/rtcore.h>
geometries int main()

{
// initialize at application startup
 Scene flags passed at creation time rtcInit();
 Static scene // create scene

RTCScene scene = rtcNewScene
(RTC_SCENE_STATIC, RTC_INTERSECT1);
 Dynamic scene
// add geometries
 etc. ... later slide ...
// commit changes
 Scene geometry changes have to get rtcCommit(scene);
commited (rtcCommit), which // trace rays

... later slide ...
triggers BVH build
// cleanup at application exit
rtcExit();
}
8
Triangle mesh
// application vertex and index layout
 Contains vertex and index buffers struct Vertex { float x, y, z, s, t; };
struct Triangle { int materialID, v0, v1, v2; };
 Number of triangles and vertices set
// add mesh to scene
at creation time unsigned int geomID = rtcNewTriangleMesh
(scene, numTriangles, numVertices, 1);
 Linear motion blur supported
// set data buffers
 2 vertex buffers rtcSetBuffer(scene, geomID, RTC_VERTEX_BUFFER,
vertexPtr, 0, sizeof(Vertex));
rtcSetBuffer(scene, geomID, RTC_INDEX_BUFFER,
indexPtr, 4, sizeof(Triangle));
// add more geometries

...
// commit changes
rtcCommit(scene);
9
Rendering (ISPC)
// loop over all screen pixels
foreach (y=0 ... screenHeight-1, x=0 ... screenWidth-1) {
// create and trace primary ray

RTCRay ray = make_Ray(p, normalize(x*vx + y*vy + vz), eps, inf);
rtcIntersect(scene, ray);
// environment shading
if (ray.geomID == RTC_INVALID_GEOMETRY_ID) {
pixels[y*screenWidth+x] = make_Vec3f(0.0f); continue;
}
// calculate hard shadows

RTCRay shadow = make_Ray(ray.org+ray.tfar*ray.dir, neg(lightDir), eps, inf);
rtcOccluded(scene, shadow);
if (shadow.geomID == RTC_INVALID_GEOMETRY_ID)
pixels[y*width+x] = colors[ray.primID]*(0.5f + clamp(-dot(lightDir, normalize(ray.Ng)), 0.0f, 1.0f));
else
pixels[y*width+x] = colors[ray.primID]*0.5f;
}
10
New/Advanced Features
Since the initial publication of Embree [Wald et al. 2014]
11
Quad meshes (Embree 2.8)
 Most 3D modeling packages produce quad meshes
 No need to convert them to triangles anymore!
 rtcNewQuadMesh
 Up to 2× lower memory usage

 Faster BVH building
 Higher ray intersection throughput
12
Subdivision surfaces (Embree 2.4)
 Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces
 Compatible with OpenSubdiv 3.0
 Displacement mapping
 Tessellation cache [Benthin et al. 2015]

 Low memory usage
 Real-time rendering performance
13
Hair
 Three hair geometry types: p0/r0 p1/r1
 Cubic Bézier hair (Embree 2.3) p2/r2
 Line segment (Embree 2.8)
p3/r3
 Cubic Bézier curve (Embree 2.10)
 Sweep surface of a circle along a Bézier curve
 High performance through use of

oriented bounding boxes [Woop et al. 2014]
 Low memory consumption through
direct ray/curve intersection
14
User defined geometries
 Enables implementing custom primitives not provided by Embree
 e.g., point, disk
 User provides:
 Bounding function
 Intersect and occluded functions
 Linear motion blur support (Embree 2.8)
15
Ray streams (Embree 2.9)
 Intersect many rays together
 e.g., 1K-4K
 rtcIntersect1M, rtcIntersectNM, rtcIntersectNp

 Enables better coherence extraction than packets
 Improves both traversal and shading [Áfra et al. 2016] performance
 Novel stream traversal algorithm

 Based on hiding memory access latency
 Improves performance by 10-30% depending on coherence
16
Embree 2.10.0 Performance
Ray tracing performance
17
Test setup
 Path tracer with complex materials and shaders (including procedural)
 Ray stream tracing with local shading coherence extraction [Áfra et al. 2016]
 Hardware:
 Dual-socket Intel® Xeon® E5-2699 v3 (Haswell, 2×18 cores, 2.3 GHz, AVX2), 64 GB DDR4
 Intel® Xeon Phi™ 7210 (Knights Landing, 64 cores, 1.3 GHz, AVX-512), 96 GB DDR4
Mazda / 5.7M triangles Villa / 37.7M triangles Conference / 0.3M triangles
18
Ray tracing performance (including shading)
100
90
80
Million rays / second
70
60 2 × Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3
50 2 × 18 cores, 2.3 GHz, AVX2
40 Intel Xeon Phi 7210
30 64 cores, 1.3 GHz, AVX-512
20
10
0
Mazda Villa Conference
19
Q&A
Visit the Intel booth for a live Embree demo running on Intel® Xeon Phi™!
20
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See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

Embree ray tracing kernels: overview and new

Conference Paper · July 2016

Attila T. Áfra Ingo Wald

Core Ray Tracing Algorithms & Data Structures View project

Visualization of Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) Data View project

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Ray Tracing Kernel Selection

Acceleration Builders Subdiv Engine Traversal Intersection

Common Vector and SIMD Library

geometries int main()

 Static scene // create scene

commited (rtcCommit), which // trace rays

// add more geometries

// create and trace primary ray

// calculate hard shadows

 Up to 2× lower memory usage

 Tessellation cache [Benthin et al. 2015]

 High performance through use of

 Linear motion blur support (Embree 2.8)

 rtcIntersect1M, rtcIntersectNM, rtcIntersectNp

 Novel stream traversal algorithm

 Improves performance by 10-30% depending on coherence

Mazda / 5.7M triangles Villa / 37.7M triangles Conference / 0.3M triangles

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