Nvidia is working on further improving GPU ray tracing performance

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NVIDIA researchers have been exploring how to further improve the GPU’s ray tracing performance. Twitter user @0x22h found a recent paper published by NVIDIA, which regards “GPU Subwarp Interleaving” as a technology to improve ray tracing performance, with an increase of up to 20%.

To achieve such a large performance improvement is not a simple matter, the micro-architecture needs to be adjusted, otherwise, the application of the technology will be limited. Since new technologies rely on architectural extensions, therefore, the existing Turing and Ampere architectures can be basically ruled out, and it is expected to be seen in the next generation of products after the Ada Lovelace architecture at the earliest. As ray tracing technology becomes more and more widely used in the graphics field, Nvidia will solve the performance problems caused by ray tracing from multiple angles to maintain the competitiveness of its products and promote it in marketing.

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.

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