Patent ID: 8674987

Claim:
An apparatus for rendering with ray tracing, comprising: an intersection testing resource, comprising a hardware element, the intersection testing resource configured for intersection testing rays with primitives composing a 3-D scene, and for outputting indications of identified intersections comprising ray identification information and information about a primitive intersected by the identified ray, wherein each primitive intersected is associated with a shader comprising computer executable code, each shader capable, during execution, of emitting new rays to be intersection tested; a shading computing resource configured to select, from shaders identifiable using the outputted indications, shaders to be executed; and a non-transitory memory, for storing data defining rays, operatively coupled with the shading computing resource, wherein the shading computing resource is configured for executing in a ray population control mode in which the selecting is based on a memory usage metric and on heuristics about amounts of new ray data that would be generated by the shaders associated with the indications.