RT-suitedness: predicting hardware ray tracing energy gains from static scene geometry
摘要
Ray tracing has become the standard for photorealistic offline rendering and is increasingly prevalent in real-time applications, yet its energy consumption remains a critical concern, particularly for industrial workloads. This paper presents a comparative study of the energy efficiency of various Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) construction heuristics and traversal methods. We evaluate hardware-accelerated ray tracing against software-based kernels with a specific focus on CAD models. We analyze the trade-offs between traversal latency and total energy cost using an NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU (Blackwell architecture), supplemented by cross-architecture validation on an RTX 4090 (Ada Lovelace). We demonstrate that optimizing BVH topology for minimal render time directly minimizes dynamic power consumption; consequently, the Surface Area Heuristic (SAH) or its Full-Sweep Variant (FSSAH) combined with tree rotation optimizations [