Reconstructing Bounding Volume Hierarchies from Memory Traces of Ray Tracers

Abstract

The ongoing race to improve computer graphics leads to more complex GPU hardware and ray tracing techniques whose internal functionality is sometimes hidden to the user. Bounding volume hierarchies and their construction are an important performance aspect of such ray tracing implementations. We propose a novel approach that utilizes binary instrumentation to collect memory traces and then uses them to extract the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) by analyzing access patters. Our reconstruction allows combining memory traces captured from multiple ray tracing views independently, increasing the reconstruction result. It reaches accuracies of 30% to 45% when comparing against the ground-truth BVH used for ray tracing a single view on a simple scene with one object. With multiple views it is even possible to reconstruct the whole BVH, while we already achieve 98% with just seven views. Because our approach is largely independent of the data structures used internally, these accurate reconstructions serve as a first step into estimation of unknown construction techniques of ray tracing implementations.