HIPRT: A Ray Tracing Framework in HIP

Abstract

We present HIPRT, an open-source ray tracing framework in HIP. HIPRT provides a versatile, cross-platform solution for professional rendering on contemporary many-core architectures. The core of the framework relies on the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) with scalable construction algorithms and efficient ray traversal, employing hardware acceleration on AMD GPUs. From a user perspective, we aim at minimalist and user-friendly API design, allowing a user to write ray tracing applications only in a few lines of code. Unlike other graphics APIs that couple ray tracing and shading together, HIPRT provides only ray tracing functionality and thus can be seamlessly integrated into existing rendering environments. To demonstrate advanced features of HIPRT, we integrated it into the three rendering systems: Blender Cycles, PBRT-v4, and Radeon ProRender.