Ray tracing & RT hardware
Accelerate intersection search, then shade the surfaces you find.
Finding where a ray hits is only one part of rendering the image.
Nested spatial bounds.
Split a warp
if (lane < 16) A(); else B();A split group issues each path with an active mask. In this equal-cost example, mixed paths use only half the issued lane slots.
What this model includes
A conceptual 32-lane SIMT group with two equal-cost one-operation paths. No reconvergence, latency hiding, or architecture-specific scheduling model.
What happens inside
Search a spatial hierarchy
A bounding volume hierarchy groups geometry into nested bounds. Traversal tests a ray against bounds before testing candidate triangles. Hardware ray-tracing units accelerate selected traversal and intersection operations. Building or updating the hierarchy consumes time and memory too.
Complete the rendering work
Shaders evaluate materials, spawn additional rays, and accumulate lighting. Incoherent rays can scatter memory accesses and diverge execution. Denoising can reconstruct an image from fewer samples, but introduces its own computation and visual tradeoffs. “RT core” is a vendor implementation name, not an interchangeable unit across chips.
What this means for your code
Low-level engineer
Profile hierarchy builds, traversal, shader complexity, and ray coherence separately. RT acceleration does not remove synchronization or resource lifetime rules.
Software developer
A frame-time comparison must match scene, ray count, resolution, reconstruction, and quality. A peak ray-rate figure cannot replace that comparison.
Read the actual specifications
These references supply the underlying contracts and implementation details. The diagrams here are simplified teaching models.