Patent ID: 7830379

Claim:
A method using a plurality of computing resources in ray tracing a 2-D representation of a 3-D scene, comprising: using a first subset of computing resources for intersection testing geometric shapes comprising one or more of primitives and geometry acceleration elements with rays traveling in a 3-D scene, each computing resource of the first subset operable to communicate with a respective localized memory resource storing a respective subset of the rays traveling in the scene; communicating indications of intersections between rays and primitives from the first subset of computing resources to a second subset of computing resources; using the second subset of the computing resources for executing shading routines associated with identified intersections between rays and primitives, outputs from the shading routines comprising new rays to be intersection tested; distributing data defining the new rays among the localized memory resource(s) to which the computing resources of the first subset are operable to communicate; and passing groupings of ray identifiers, each ray identifier comprising data other than ray definition data for that ray, and shape data among the computing resources of the first subset to activate intersection testing of identified rays with shapes indicated by the shape data, the testing comprising, by each computing resource, retrieving data defining an identified ray stored in its localized memory, testing the indicated shape for intersection based on the retrieved ray definition data and outputting an indication of a detected intersection for communication.