Patent Document ID: 9224235
Application ID: 13848011
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method, comprising: receiving a bounding volume hierarchy comprising a plurality of nodes, wherein each node is associated with a bounding volume; encoding the bounding volume hierarchy to generate an encoded bounding volume hierarchy stored in a memory; and accessing, via a graphics processing unit, the encoded bounding volume hierarchy in the memory for performing one or more calculations associated with a rendering algorithm; wherein each node in the encoded bounding volume hierarchy indicates whether the node inherits zero or more values from a parent node, wherein encoding the bounding volume hierarchy comprises: generating a data structure representing the encoded bounding volume hierarchy; and for each node in the bounding volume hierarchy, storing a node data structure in the data structure, wherein the node data structure includes a first field that stores one or more values associated with the bounding volume for the node and a second field that indicates inheritance characteristics of the node, wherein the one or more values are encoded based on an equally divided interval between a minimum coordinate of a bounding volume associated with the parent node and a maximum coordinate of the bounding volume associated with the parent node, and wherein the number of equally divided sub-intervals in the interval is based on a number of bits, for each value in the one or more associated with the bounding volume for the node: calculating an error for the value by taking the difference between the value and an encoded version of the value, determining whether the error associated with encoding the value is above a threshold value, wherein the threshold value is calculated based on the level of the node in the bounding volume hierarchy; and if the error is below the threshold value, then encoding the value using the number of bits, or if the error is above the threshold value, then encoding the value using additional bits to generate smaller sub-intervals between the minimum coordinate and the maximum coordinate.