Nvidia is working on further improving GPU ray tracing performance
In the paper, the limitations of ray tracing performance due to the way NVIDIA GPUs are currently designed are discussed. At present, in order to meet the needs of large-scale parallel computing, the GPU uses the SIMD execution mode. The input of several identical operations will be packaged into a group for parallel execution. This group is the smallest execution unit of the GPU, which Nvidia calls “warp”. The GPU hides the pause by mobilizing the warp, but in real-time ray tracing operations, problems may occur and performance losses may occur. And “GPU Subwarp Interleaving” is a solution to the current GPU dilemma.
Using a suite of applications with ray-tracing workloads, the researchers achieved performance gains of an average of 6.3 percent and up to 20 percent on a modified, enhanced Turing architecture GPU. Existing GeForce graphics cards won’t be able to get this effect with a driver update, only this new technology will be applied to future architectures.