Lufei Liu, Wesley Chang, Francois Demoullin, Yuan Hsi Chou, Mohammadreza Saed, David Pankratz, Tyler Nowicki, Tor M. Aamodt

54th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), 2021

Recent Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) incorporate hardware accelerator units designed for ray tracing. These accelerator units target the process of traversing hierarchical tree data structures used to test for ray-object intersections. We propose a ray intersection predictor that speculatively elides redundant operations during this process and proceeds directly to test primitives that the ray is likely to intersect.