Patent ID: 8854369
Filing Date: 2014-10-07
Classification: G06T

Abstract:
1. A non-transitory machine readable medium storing instructions for configuring a machine to perform a method, comprising: configuring a computation cell, from a set of computation cells, to execute a traversal operation for traversing a ray in a hierarchical geometry acceleration structure; deferring further processing of the ray by storing, in a temporary ray buffer coupled with the set of computation cells, data identifying the ray and indicating subsequent processing to be performed with that ray; and resuming processing of the ray responsive to identifying a portion of other rays to be processed concurrently with the ray in the set of computation cells, the resuming processing comprising allocating a computation cell from the set of computation cells to execute a traversal operation for the ray, retrieving definition data for the ray from a non-transitory memory and providing the definition data for the ray for storage in registers of the computation cell allocated to execute the traversal operation, wherein the method further comprises storing a current closest intersection, if any, and conditioning traversal of the ray by testing against the current closest intersection and avoiding traversal of an element of the acceleration structure that has no chance of containing a piece of geometry closer to an origin of the ray than the current closest intersection.