4/2/2025 at 3:35:58 PM
I wrote an non-RTX on-GPU raytracer a while back (naive compared to this) and it's super-interesting to read about the advances in compressing BVH structures.But the changes also highlights a change in focus from just implementing this naively(RDNA3 technically not too much removed from the naive raytracer I wrote) to moving it to something carefully engineered and optimized for memory bandwidth (with savings circuits even built into silicon?).
by whizzter
4/2/2025 at 11:54:23 PM
Seems very likely that the hardware decompresses the data more or less on the fly. The acceleration structures are for the hardware, arithmetics hardware is cheap (compared to memory access), and they could use the compressed structures on older hardware with new drivers if hardware support wasn't necessary.by ahartmetz