Interactive SIMD ray tracing for large deformable tetrahedral meshes

Abstract

We introduce an interactive ray tracing method for large deformable tetrahedral meshes which has carefully been designed for supporting general single instruction multiple data (SIMD) operations. It uses memory aligned and SIMD-friendly hierarchical acceleration structures and tetrahedron acceleration data allowing SIMD ray traversal and a newly proposed SIMD barycentric tetrahedron-plane intersection test. The method is very general and allows volume-, opaque- and accelerated (semi) iso surface-rendering as well as visualizing multidimensional data. It scales for static data sets sublinear to data size, such that it is well suited for visualizing massive data sets. The method is also very portable and not restricted to specialized hardware, such that it natively supports near future hardware which will be many core architectures supporting up to 512-bit register operations, allowing for each core to trace up to 16 rays at once through the mesh