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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04382 |
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| _version_ | 1866918282827661312 |
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| author | Tuya, Zulkhuu Alzugaray, Ignacio Fry, Nicholas Davison, Andrew J. |
| author_facet | Tuya, Zulkhuu Alzugaray, Ignacio Fry, Nicholas Davison, Andrew J. |
| contents | Many emerging many-core accelerators replace a single large device memory with hundreds to thousands of lightweight cores, each owning only a small local SRAM and exchanging data via explicit on-chip communication. This organization offers high aggregate bandwidth, but it breaks a key assumption behind many volumetric rendering techniques: that rays can randomly access a large, unified scene representation. Rendering efficiently on such hardware therefore requires distributing both data and computation, keeping ray traversal mostly local, and structuring communication into predictable routes.
We present a fully in-SRAM, distributed renderer for the Radiant Foam Voronoi-cell volumetric representation on the Graphcore Mk2 IPU(Intelligence Processing Unit), a many-core accelerator with tile-local SRAM and explicit inter-tile communication. Our system shards the scene across tiles and forwards rays between shards through a hierarchical routing overlay, enabling ray marching entirely from on-chip SRAM with predictable communication. On Mip-NeRF~360 scenes, the system attains near-interactive throughput of approximately 1 fps at 640x480 with image and depth map quality close to the original GPU-based Radiant Foam implementation, while keeping all scene data and ray state in on-chip SRAM. Beyond demonstrating feasibility, we analyze routing, memory, and scheduling bottlenecks that inform how future distributed-memory accelerators can better support irregular, data-movement-heavy rendering workloads. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_04382 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Radiant Foam Rendering on a Graph Processor Tuya, Zulkhuu Alzugaray, Ignacio Fry, Nicholas Davison, Andrew J. Graphics Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Many emerging many-core accelerators replace a single large device memory with hundreds to thousands of lightweight cores, each owning only a small local SRAM and exchanging data via explicit on-chip communication. This organization offers high aggregate bandwidth, but it breaks a key assumption behind many volumetric rendering techniques: that rays can randomly access a large, unified scene representation. Rendering efficiently on such hardware therefore requires distributing both data and computation, keeping ray traversal mostly local, and structuring communication into predictable routes. We present a fully in-SRAM, distributed renderer for the Radiant Foam Voronoi-cell volumetric representation on the Graphcore Mk2 IPU(Intelligence Processing Unit), a many-core accelerator with tile-local SRAM and explicit inter-tile communication. Our system shards the scene across tiles and forwards rays between shards through a hierarchical routing overlay, enabling ray marching entirely from on-chip SRAM with predictable communication. On Mip-NeRF~360 scenes, the system attains near-interactive throughput of approximately 1 fps at 640x480 with image and depth map quality close to the original GPU-based Radiant Foam implementation, while keeping all scene data and ray state in on-chip SRAM. Beyond demonstrating feasibility, we analyze routing, memory, and scheduling bottlenecks that inform how future distributed-memory accelerators can better support irregular, data-movement-heavy rendering workloads. |
| title | Radiant Foam Rendering on a Graph Processor |
| topic | Graphics Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04382 |