49 results about "Bounding volume hierarchy" patented technology

Methods, systems, devices, and computer program code (software) products enable acceleration of ray tracing by using acceleration data structures with high arity to enable processing of nodes using streaming SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) instructions with reduced memory requirements.

An apparatus and method are described for using tessellation hardware to generate bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) and perform other ray tracing operations. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: a shader to output a plurality of tessellation factors and one or more input surfaces; and a tessellation circuit comprising first circuitry and / or logic to tesselate each input surface to generate a new set of primitives and second circuitry and / or logic to concurrently generate a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) based on the new set of primitives.

Apparatus and method for a compressed stack representation for a BVH. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: a ray generator to generate a plurality of rays in a first graphics scene; a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) generator to construct a BVH comprising a plurality of hierarchically arranged nodes, wherein the BVH comprises a specified number of child nodes at a current BVH level beneath a parent node in the hierarchy; traversal / intersection circuitry to traverse one or more of the rays through the hierarchically arranged nodes of the BVH and intersect the one or more rays with primitives contained within the nodes; a short traversal stack of a fixed size comprising a specified number of entries fewer than the number of child nodes beneath the parent node, each entry associated with a child node at the current BVH level, the entries ordered from top to bottom within the short traversal stack based on a sorted distance of each respective child node, wherein each entry includes a field to indicate whether that entry is associated with a final child in the current BVH level; wherein the traversal / intersection circuitry is to process entries from the top of the traversal stack, removing entries as they are processed, the traversal / intersection circuitry to determine that a current entry is associated with the final child node at the current BVH level by reading a first value in the field.

Some aspects of the disclosure include systems and methods for grouping rays into sets according to their directions. In some cases, the rays of the directional sets may then be organized into a hierarchy according to their origins and bounding cones are generated for the hierarchy nodes. The resulting bounding cone hierarchy may be intersected with a bounding volume hierarchy or other scene hierarchy.

A system, method, and computer program product are provided for modifying a hierarchical tree data structure. An initial hierarchical tree data structure is received and treelets of node neighborhoods in the initial hierarchical tree data structure are formed. Each treelet includes n leaf nodes and n−1 internal nodes. The treelets are restructured, by a processor, to produce an optimized hierarchical tree data structure.