Microsoft has proposed a new method to make ray tracing in games faster with future DXR API updates by leveraging SSDs to limit VRAM usage.
Ray Tracing Has Become The Gaming Standard & Microsoft Aims To Make It Efficient & Faster By Investing In New Techniques Such as Utilizing SSD To Limit VRAM Usage In DXR API Updates
More and more games are now utilizing ray tracing or path tracing techniques to deliver immersive and realistic visuals to gamers but all of this comes at a cost. In the paper “Systems and methods for ray tracing acceleration structure level of detail processing”, Microsoft states that ray tracing & its associated acceleration structures are edited/regenerated by software. They are competing for storage solutions for faster data transfer and detail processing.
Increasingly, as part of video games and other such applications, the acceleration structures for ray tracing are explicitly edited or regenerated by the software to reflect the current set of potentially visible geometry. Such acceleration structures are now competing for storage (both persistent (e.g., flash memory) and non-persistent (e.g., RAM)) with other data, such as geometry and texture data.
This growth in the share of the memory by the acceleration structures has resulted in systems with significantly large memory requirements. Moreover, the bandwidth required to fetch the large amount of data for acceleration structures has also proportionally gotten bigger. The systems and methods described herein help minimize the space required for ray tracing acceleration structures.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems and methods for better handling of the data associated with the acceleration structures.
via Google Patents
The patent lists certain solutions such as having more manageable pools of data associated with the acceleration structures. These can be saved either within the memory or storage devices such as SSDs which offer the fastest processing speeds outside of non-persistent storage options.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out but one thing is for sure utilizing faster storage devices such as SSDs is going to help accelerate ray tracing performance. Microsoft’s DXR API can be made to work in tandem with Microsoft’s Direct I/O suite which has a proven track record of utilizing HDDs/SSDs to their fullest potential and with Gen5 SSDs picking up the pace in the PC industry, we can see this idea come into fruition.