Vulkan-Sim: A GPU Architecture Simulator for Ray Tracing

This artifact includes

• sciprts to run the benchmarks and plot the results of vulkan-sim paper published in MICRO 2022 conference.
• A docker containing Vulkan-Sim and all workload traces used in the paper.

Ray tracing can generate photorealistic images with more convincing visual effects compared to rasterization. Recent hardware advances have pushed for the technique to be applied in real-time. Current consumer GPUs feature a dedicated ray tracing acceleration unit, and video game developers have started to make use of ray tracing APIs to bring more realistic graphics to their players. Vulkan features an open-standard API for ray tracing with cross-platform access to modern GPUs. Industry leaders have cooperatively contributed to Vulkan, setting the standard for real-time ray tracing. In this paper, we introduce Vulkan-Sim, a detailed cycle-level simulator for studying Vulkan ray tracing workloads. We build upon the existing GPGPU-Sim simulator, integrating it with Mesa, an open source graphics driver, and add dedicated ray traversal and intersection units. We evaluate several ray tracing workloads with Vulkan-Sim, identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies of the ray tracing hardware we model. Based on these findings, we also explore a technique of coalescing function calls and independent thread scheduling to alleviate warp divergence and low SIMD efficiency.