Patent ID: 8300049

Claim:
A machine implemented method of 3-D rendering using ray tracing, comprising: receiving, from a programming interface, respective specifications for a plurality of rays to be processed; instantiating, for each of the plurality of rays, a schedulable instance of ray processing code obtained from a non-transitory medium, the ray processing code for use in configuring a plurality of processing units; maintaining respective status information for the schedulable instances, wherein each schedulable instance is associated with status information interpretable to identify a subsequent processing step within the ray processing code, to be performed on that schedulable instance by a processing unit of the plurality of processing units; receiving, from the plurality of processing units, status information for a subset of the schedulable instances loaded for processing in the plurality of processing units; and responsive to the status information received from the plurality of processing units, selecting a further subset of the schedulable instances to be processed in the plurality of processing units.