ReduceM: Interactive and Memory Efficient Ray Tracing of Large Models

Abstract

We present a novel representation and algorithm, ReduceM, for memory efficient ray tracing of large scenes. ReduceM exploits the connectivity between triangles in a mesh and decomposes the model into triangle strips. We also describe a new stripification algorithm, Strip-RT, that can generate long strips with high spatial coherence. Our approach uses a two-level traversal algorithm for ray-primitive intersection. In practice, ReduceM can significantly reduce the storage overhead and ray trace massive models with hundreds of millions of triangles at interactive rates on desktop PCs with 4-8GB of main memory.