CUDA Ray Tracer Outperforms Vulkan/RTX by 3x
2025-06-26
This article details the author's journey building a CUDA-based ray tracer that surpasses a Vulkan/RTX implementation—sometimes by over 3x—on identical hardware. Starting with a naive CUDA port, the author systematically optimized the renderer, tackling recursion, register pressure, memory layouts, and branching inefficiencies. Techniques like explicit stacks, structure of arrays, early ray termination, and Russian roulette were employed, resulting in a frame time reduction from 2.5 seconds to 9 milliseconds. The article dives deep into CUDA performance bottlenecks and offers practical optimization strategies. Benchmarks showcase the significant performance gains achieved on an RTX 3080.
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Development
GPU Optimization