The starting point for Traverse
2019–2021 · Hardware research engagement. Imagination Technologies needed rendering workloads that could inform the design of future ray-tracing GPUs. Traverse began by developing micro-benchmarks and a pre-silicon ray-tracing benchmark suite for that investigation.
This work predates a consumer device on which an ordinary game benchmark can run. The task was to create workloads that expose architectural behaviour early enough to influence engineering decisions.
From a question to a workload
The suite connected hardware questions to controlled rendering experiments. Micro-benchmarks isolate behaviour; broader ray-tracing workloads show how that behaviour participates in an actual frame. Both are needed when a result will be used to compare architectural choices rather than simply rank finished products.
What followed
That founding work established an approach we still use in Breda and Evolve: build the workload, understand the rendering path and keep measurements connected to the conditions that produced them. It remains central to how we investigate hardware and rendering performance.