Patent ID: 8339398

Claim:
A method, comprising: providing an integrated acceleration data structure comprising a spatial index and at least one scene graph, the spatial index partitioning a three dimensional scene into smaller bounding volumes through a use of splitting planes which are parallel to a selected axis and the at least one scene graph comprising an object oriented heirarchy including an object node representing a physical object within one of the bounding volumes and one or more children object nodes representing real world physical parts of the physical object, wherein the nodes representing the real world physical parts do not point to primitives, wherein the integrated acceleration data structure includes data flags to differentiate bounding volume nodes representing the bounding volumes from object nodes representing physical objects; with a first processing element, issuing a ray into a three dimensional scene, traversing the spatial index of the integrated acceleration data structure by taking branches to those bounding volume nodes intersected by the ray; and with a second processing element, traversing the integrated acceleration data structure to locate the physical objects and performing physics based calculations on the located physical objects, wherein the second processing element uses the data flags to find the located physical objects in the integrated acceleration data structure, wherein the first processing element and the second processing element simultaneously operate on the integrated acceleration data structure.