Patent ID: 8472455

Claim:
A method, comprising: allocating a queue for each of a plurality of treelets of a hierarchical structure, each queue configured to store ray-states entering a respective one of the plurality of treelets, each of the ray-states including data identifying a particular ray and a traversal state of the particular ray; determining that a ray-state exits a first treelet of the hierarchical structure and enters a second treelet of the hierarchical structure; and forwarding the ray-state entering the second treelet to a processing element for processing therein by: determining that none of a plurality of processing elements are configured to process ray-states included within the second treelet, determining that a processing element previously processed the ray-states included within the second treelet, and forwarding the ray-state to the processing element which previously processed the ray-states included within the second treelet, bypassing the queue allocated to store the ray-states entering the second treelet, such that the queue allocated to store the ray-states entering the second treelet is bypassed by the forwarding operation.