Patent ID: 11887242
Assignee: ARM LIMITED
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 2:
3. The circuitry of claim 2, in which:
the ray tracing circuitry is responsive to ray data indicating the ray direction, the ray data defining a reciprocal of a ray vector representing the ray direction;
the ray tracing circuitry comprising multiplier circuitry configured to perform a division by the ray vector by implementing a multiplication by the ray data defining the reciprocal of the ray vector;
the ray tracing circuitry is configured to perform processing operations according to clock cycles of a succession of clock cycles, in which each of the floating-point circuitries is configured to perform a respective floating-point operation according to a single respective one of the succession of clock cycles, in which the ray tracing circuitry operates as pipelined circuitry having a plurality of successive pipeline stages; and
in which the ray tracing circuitry is configured to detect intersection of the virtual ray with a hierarchical set of bounding volumes, in which, at a given hierarchy level, each bounding volume comprises a predetermined number of bounding volumes at a next lower hierarchy level and in which the ray tracing circuitry is configured, for the given hierarchy level, to detect intersection of the virtual ray with each of the bounding volumes at the next lower hierarchy level and in which the ray tracing circuitry comprises the predetermined number of intersection-detecting circuitries operable in parallel, one intersection-detecting circuitry being configured to detect intersection for a respective one of the predetermined number of bounding volumes at a next lower hierarchy level.