Early culling for ray tracing
AssigneeAdvanced Micro Devices, Inc.
InventorsSkyler Jonathon Saleh, Sagar S. Bhandare, Fataneh F. Ghodrat, Paul Raymond Vella
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A technique for performing ray tracing operations is provided. The technique includes reading descendant-shared type metadata for a non-leaf node of a bounding volume hierarchy; identifying one or more culling types for a ray-intersection test for a ray; and determining whether to treat the non-leaf node as not intersected based on whether the one or more culling types includes at least one type specified by the descendant-shared type metadata.
Claims20
A method for performing ray tracing operations, the method comprising:
- reading descendant-shared type metadata for a non-leaf node of a bounding volume hierarchy, wherein the descendant-shared type metadata includes type information other than geometry defining a bounding box for the non-leaf node, wherein the type information is common among all descendant leaf nodes of the non-leaf node;
- identifying one or more culling types for a ray-intersection test for a ray;
- and
- determining whether to treat the non-leaf node as not intersected based on whether the one or more culling types includes at least one type specified by the descendant-shared type metadata.
A system, comprising:
- an acceleration structure traversal stage configured to:
- read descendant-shared type metadata for a non-leaf node of a bounding volume hierarchy, wherein the descendant-shared type metadata includes type information other than geometry defining a bounding box for the non-leaf node, wherein the type information is common among all descendant leaf nodes of the non-leaf node,
- identify one or more culling types for a ray-intersection test for a ray, and
- determine whether to treat the non-leaf node as not intersected based on whether the one or more culling types includes at least one type specified by the descendant-shared type metadata;
- and
- a memory configured to store at least a part of the bounding volume hierarchy.
A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing instructions that, when executed by a processor, causes the processor to:
- read descendant-shared type metadata for a non-leaf node of a bounding volume hierarchy, wherein the descendant-shared type metadata includes type information other than geometry defining a bounding box for the non-leaf node, wherein the type information is common among all descendant leaf nodes of the non-leaf node;
- identify one or more culling types for a ray-intersection test for a ray;
- and
- determine whether to treat the non-leaf node as not intersected based on whether the one or more culling types includes at least one type specified by the descendant-shared type metadata.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.