This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
15.8. Performance and Optimization
We’ll now consider several examples of optimization in hardware-based rendering. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but rather a set of model techniques from which you can draw ideas to generate your own optimizations when you need them.
15.8.1. Abstraction Considerations
Many performance optimizations will come at the price of significantly complicating the implementation. Weigh the performance advantage of an optimization against the additional cost of debugging and code maintenance. High-level algorithmic optimizations may require significant thought and restructuring of code, but they tend to yield the best tradeoff of performance for code complexity. For example, simply dividing the screen in half and asynchronously rendering each side on a separate processor nearly doubles performance at the cost of perhaps 50 additional lines of code that do not interact with the inner loop of the renderer.
In contrast, consider some low-level optimizations that we intentionally passed over. These include reducing common subexpressions (e.g., mapping all of those repeated divisions to multiplications by an inverse that is computed once) and lifting constants outside loops. Performing those destroys the clarity of the algorithm, but will probably gain only a 50% throughput improvement.
This is not to say that low-level optimizations are not worthwhile. But they are primarily worthwhile when you have completed your high-level optimizations; at that point you are more willing to complicate your code and its maintenance because you are done adding features.
15.8.2. Architectural Considerations
The primary difference between the simple rasterizer and ray caster described in this chapter is that the “for each pixel” and “for each triangle” loops have the opposite nesting. This is a trivial change and the body of the inner loop is largely similar in each case. But the trivial change has profound implications for memory access patterns and how we can algorithmically optimize each.
Scene triangles are typically stored in the heap. They may be in a flat 1D array, or arranged in a more sophisticated data structure. If they are in a simple data structure such as an array, then we can ensure reasonable memory coherence by iterating through them in the same order that they appear in memory. That produces efficient cache behavior. However, that iteration also requires substantial bandwidth because the entire scene will be processed for each pixel. If we use a more sophisticated data structure, then we likely will reduce bandwidth but also reduce memory coherence. Furthermore, adjacent pixels likely sample the same triangle, but by the time we have iterated through to testing that triangle again it is likely to have been flushed from the cache. A popular low-level optimization for a ray tracer is to trace a bundle of rays called a ray packet through adjacent pixels. These rays likely traverse the scene data structure in a similar way, which increases memory coherence. On a SIMD processor a single thread can trace an entire packet simultaneously. However, packet tracing suffers from computational coherence problems. Sometimes different rays in the same packet progress to different parts of the scene data structure or branch different ways in the ray intersection test. In these cases, processing multiple rays simultaneously on a thread gives no advantage because memory coherence is lost or both sides of the branch must be taken. As a result, fast ray tracers are often designed to trace packets through very sophisticated data structures. They are typically limited not by computation but by memory performance problems arising from resultant cache inefficiency.
Because frame buffer storage per pixel is often much smaller than scene structure per triangle, the rasterizer has an inherent memory performance advantage over the ray tracer. A rasterizer reads each triangle into memory and then processes it to completion, iterating over many pixels. Those pixels must be adjacent to each other in space. For a row-major image, if we iterate along rows, then the pixels covered by the triangle are also adjacent in memory and we will have excellent coherence and fairly low memory bandwidth in the inner loop. Furthermore, we can process multiple adjacent pixels, either horizontally or vertically, simultaneously on a SIMD architecture. These will be highly memory and branch coherent because we’re stepping along a single triangle. There are many variations on ray casting and rasterization that improve their asymptotic behavior. However, these algorithms have historically been applied to only millions of triangles and pixels. At those sizes, constant factors like coherence still drive the performance of the algorithms, and rasterization’s superior coherence properties have made it preferred for high-performance rendering. The cost of this coherence is that after even the few optimizations needed to get real-time performance from a rasterizer, the code becomes so littered with bit-manipulation tricks and highly derived terms that the elegance of a simple ray cast seems very attractive from a software engineering perspective. This difference is only magnified when we make the rendering algorithm more sophisticated. The conventional wisdom is that ray-tracing algorithms are elegant and easy to extend but are hard to optimize, and rasterization algorithms are very efficient but are awkward and hard to augment with new features. Of course, one can always make a ray tracer fast and ugly (which packet tracing succeeds at admirably) and a rasterizer extensible but slow (e.g., Pixar’s RenderMan, which was used extensively in film rendering over the past two decades).
15.8.3. Early-Depth-Test Example
One simple optimization that can significantly improve performance, yet only minimally affects clarity, is an early depth test. Both the rasterizer and the ray-tracer structures sometimes shaded a point, only to later find that some other point was closer to the surface. As an optimization, we might first find the closest point before doing any shading, then go back and shade the point that was closest. In ray tracing, each pixel is processed to completion before moving to the next, so this involves running the entire visibility loop for one pixel, maintaining the shading inputs for the closest-known intersection at each iteration, and then shading after that loop terminates. In rasterization, pixels are processed many times, so we have to make a complete first pass to determine visibility and then a second pass to do shading. This is called an early-depth pass [HW96] if it primes depthBuffer so that only the surface that shades will pass the inner test. The process is called deferred shading if it also accumulates the shading parameters so that they do not need to be recomputed. This style of rendering was first introduced by Whitted and Weimer [WW82] to compute shading independent from visibility at a time when primary visibility computation was considered expensive. Within a decade it was considered a method to accelerate complex rendering toward real-time rendering (and the “deferred” term was coined) [MEP92], and today its use is widespread as a further optimization on hardware platforms that already achieve real time for complex scenes.
For a scene that has high depth complexity (i.e., in which many triangles project to the same point in the image) and an expensive shading routine, the performance benefit of an early depth test is significant. The cost of rendering a pixel without an early depth test is Ο(tv + ts), where t is the number of triangles, v is the time for a visibility test, and s is the time for shading. This is an upper bound. When we are lucky and always encounter the closest triangle first, the performance matches the lower bound of Ω(tv + s) since we only shade once. The early-depth optimization ensures that we are always in this lower-bound case. We have seen how rasterization can drive the cost of v very low—it can be reduced to a few additions per pixel—at which point the challenge becomes reducing the number of triangles tested at each pixel. Unfortunately, that is not as simple. Strategies exist for obtaining expected Ο(v log t + s) rendering times for scenes with certain properties, but they significantly increase code complexity.
15.8.4. When Early Optimization Is Good
The domain of graphics raises two time-based exceptions to the general rule of thumb to avoid premature optimization. The more significant of these exceptions is that when low-level optimizations can accelerate a rendering algorithm just enough to make it run at interactive rates, it might be worth making those optimizations early in the development process. It is much easier to debug an interactive rendering system than an offline one. Interaction allows you to quickly experiment with new viewpoints and scene variations, effectively giving you a true 3D perception of your data instead of a 2D slice. If that lets you debug faster, then the optimization has increased your ability to work with the code despite the added complexity. The other exception applies when the render time is just at the threshold of your patience. Most programmers are willing to wait for 30 seconds for an image to render, but they will likely leave the computer or switch tasks if the render time is, say, more than two minutes. Every time you switch tasks or leave the computer you’re amplifying the time cost of debugging, because on your return you have to recall what you were doing before you left and get back into the development flow. If you can reduce the render time to something you are willing to wait for, then you have cut your debugging time and made the process sufficiently more pleasant that your productivity will again rise despite increased code complexity. We enshrine these ideas in a principle:
The Early Optimization Principle:
It’s worth optimizing early if it makes the difference between an interactive program and one that takes several minutes to execute. Shortening the debugging cycle and supporting interactive testing are worth the extra effort.
15.8.5. Improving the Asymptotic Bound
To scale to truly large scenes, no linear-time rendering algorithm suffices. We must somehow eliminate whole parts of the scene without actually touching their data even once. Data structures for this are a classic area of computer graphics that continues to be a hot research topic. The basic idea behind most of these is the same as behind using tree and bucket data structures for search and sort problems. Visibility testing is primarily a search operation, where we are searching for the closest ray intersection with the scene. If we precompute a treelike data structure that orders the scene primitives in some way that allows conservatively culling a constant fraction of the primitives at each layer, we will approach Ο(log n)-time visibility testing for the entire scene, instead of Ο(n) in the number of primitives. When the cost of traversing tree nodes is sufficiently low, this strategy scales well for arbitrarily constructed scenes and allows an exponential increase in the number of primitives we can render in a fixed time. For scenes with specific kinds of structure we may be able to do even better. For example, say that we could find an indexing scheme or hash function that can divide our scene into Ο(n) buckets that allow conservative culling with Ο(1) primitives per bucket. This would approach Ο(d)-time visibility testing in the distance d to the first intersection. When that distance is small (e.g., in twisty corridors), the runtime of this scheme for static scenes becomes independent of the number of primitives and we can theoretically render arbitrarily large scenes. See Chapter 37 for a detailed discussion of algorithms based on these ideas.