Patent ID: 8736610

Claim:
A 3-D graphics rendering system using ray tracing, comprising: a set of computation cells, each cell capable of being configured to execute a traversal operation for traversing a ray in a hierarchical geometry acceleration structure and a primitive test operation between a ray and a geometric primitive defining a surface of an object; a temporary ray buffer coupled with the set of computation cells, the temporary ray buffer operable to store data identifying rays and indicating subsequent processing to be performed with each ray, the temporary ray buffer capable of maintaining data for more rays than can be concurrently tested in the set of computation cells; a control for the set of computation cells, operable to allocate cells from the set of computation cells between performing a traversal operation and performing a primitive test operation, to select rays from the temporary ray buffer according to the respective next processing step to be performed with that ray and to allocate the selected rays to respective cells from the set of computation cells, wherein data for the allocated rays is retrieved from the temporary ray buffer and provided to the respective test cells to which the rays were allocated; and one or more processors, coupled to the set of computation cells, capable of executing respective portions of shader code using inputs received from the set of computation cells.