A Texture Streaming Pipeline for Real-Time GPU Ray Tracing

Mark Lee, Nathan Zeichner, and Yining Karl Li
ACM SIGGRAPH 2025 Talks. Article No. 12

A scene from Moana 2, rendered using our real-time GPU ray tracer (B, C, D) and compared with the final frame (A) from Disney’s Hyperion Renderer. Rendering without textures (D) is not a useful previsualization for (A). Without streaming, only the lowest resolution MIP tile per Ptex face can fit on the GPU (C). With our texture streaming, we handle 1.5 TB of Ptex files on disk using only 2 GB of GPU VRAM to achieve a result (B) that matches the texture detail of (A) while maintaining >95% of the average performance of (D), without stalls.

Abstract

Disney Animation makes heavy use of Ptex [Burley and Lacewell 2008] across our assets [Burley et al. 2018], which required a new texture streaming pipeline for our new real-time ray tracer. Our goal was to create a scalable system which could provide a real-time, zero-stall experience to users at all times, even as the number of Ptex files expands into the tens of thousands. We cap the maximum size of the GPU cache to a relatively small footprint, and employ a fast LRU eviction scheme when we hit the limit.

Downloads and Links

Publication:

Paper, PDF (11.4 MB)

Official Publisher's Version (External Link)

Blog Post

Video:

Demo Video, MP4 (89.4 MB)

Text Reference

Mark Lee, Nathan Zeichner, and Yining Karl Li. A Texture Streaming Pipeline for Real-Time GPU Ray Tracing. ACM SIGGRAPH 2025 Talks. Article 12, Aug 2025.

Bibtex Reference

@article{Lee2025GPUPtex,
	author = {Lee, Mark and Zeichner, Nathan and Li, Yining Karl},
	title = {A Texture Streaming Pipeline for Real-Time GPU Ray Tracing},
	journal = {ACM SIGGRAPH 2025 Talks},
	month = aug,
	year = {2025},
	articleno = {12},
	doi = {10.1145/3721239.3734098},
}

Acknowledgements

We thank Disney Animation's Hyperion development team and Interactive Visualization development team for supporting this project, and we thank Brent Burley and Daniel Teece for their feedback and assistance with various Ptex topics. Also, we acknowledge and thank Joe Schutte for developing an earlier prototype of a GPU Ptex system at Disney Animation, from which the cuckoo hash table idea originated.