Efficient Ray Traversal of Constrained Delaunay Tetrahedralization

Acceleration structures are mandatory for ray-tracing applications, allowing to cast a large number of rays per second. In 2008, Lagae and Dutre have proposed to use Constrained Delaunay Tetrahedralization (CDT) as an acceleration structure for ray tracing. Our experiments show that their traversal algorithm is not suitable for GPU applications, mainly due to arithmetic errors. This article proposes a new CDT traversal algorithm. This new algorithm is more efficient than the previous ones: it uses less arithmetic operations; it does not add extra thread divergence since it uses a fixed number of operation; at last, it is robust with 32-bits floats, contrary to the previous traversal algorithms. Hence, it is the first method usable both on CPU and GPU.

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