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Raytracing on Intel's Arc B580

Edit: The article originally said Intel’s BVH nodes were 4-wide, based on a misreading of QuadLeaf.

Intel’s short stack algorithm requires more pointer chasing steps than a simple depth first search, making it even more sensitive to memory latency. Even though Intel’s raytracing method launches a lot of shader programs, much of that is contained within the Xe Cores and doesn’t bother higher level scheduling hardware. Raytracing workloads are diverse, and engineers have to allocate their transistor budget between fixed function BVH traversal hardware and regular vector execution units.

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