Patent ID: 11915369
Assignee: INTEL CORPORATION
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 16:
17. A non-transitory machine-readable medium having program code stored thereon which, when executed by a machine, causes the machine to perform operations of:
constructing a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) comprising a plurality of hierarchically arranged BVH nodes;
reading, by multi-function traversal circuitry, a BVH node from a top of a BVH node stack, the multi-function traversal circuitry configured to both traverse query boxes through the BVH and traverse rays through the BVH, wherein to traverse query boxes through the BVH, the multi-function traversal circuitry performs additional operations of:
reading a query box from a local storage or memory; comparing maximum and minimum X, Y, and Z coordinates of the BVH node and the query box;
generating an overlap indication if overlap is detected for each of the X, Y, and Z dimensions;
generating a distance value representing an extent of overlap between the BVH node and the query box; and

sorting the BVH node within a set of one or more additional BVH nodes based on the distance value.