RTX beyond ray tracing: exploring the use of hardware ray tracing cores for tet-mesh point location

We explore a first proof-of-concept example of creatively using the Turing generation’s hardware ray tracing cores to solve a problem other than classical ray tracing, specifically, point location in unstructured tetrahedral meshes. Starting with a CUDA reference method, we describe and evaluate three different approaches to reformulate this problem in a manner that allows it to be mapped to these new hardware units. Each variant replaces the simpler problem of point queries with the more complex one of ray queries; however, thanks to hardware acceleration, these approaches are actually faster than the reference method.