Astonishing Discrepancies: A Comparison of Acceleration Structure Memory Usage Across GPUs
2025-04-02
This article benchmarks the memory consumption of building acceleration structures (BVHs) for ray tracing across different vendor GPUs. The results reveal significant discrepancies, with the latest NVIDIA GPUs using only one-third or even one-twentieth the memory of AMD counterparts. The article delves into the internal structure of BVHs, contrasting different driver implementations and hardware architecture effects. It analyzes the BVH implementation details of AMD's RDNA2/3 and RDNA4 architectures, explaining the reasons behind the memory usage differences. Finally, the author concludes that BVH memory consumption is heavily influenced by hardware, drivers, and algorithms, and projects future improvement potential.
(zeux.io)
Hardware
acceleration structure