A ray queueing and sorting design for real time ray casting

This paper presents a hardware design that processes several rays simultaneously to improve the memory access and compositing performance for three dimensional image synthesis using ray casting. By processing multiple rays, the memory access coherence of a group of neighbouring rays can be exploited and fewer page misses in a modern SDRAM memory device are encountered. Tracing multiple rays also avoids the data hazard that occurs when tracing the path of a single ray. Implementation of the presented design in a real time volume rendering system improves the performance of the system by increasing the number of frames rendered per second.