High-Performance Ray Tracing

We describe how the Intel Embree ray tracing kernel library can be used to achieve high performance and high image quality on Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. We demonstrate that this hardware/software combination can reach levels of performance (on nontrivial workloads) comparable to and often better than any other CPU or GPU known today. Moreover, the ray tracing computation itself and related vectorization strategies are conceptually straightforward for nonexperts, and a simple example is given that illustrates the key elements of an application which uses Embree on Xeon Phi coprocessors.