Displacement-centric acceleration for ray tracing

A system comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a memory device configured to store a native base surface defined by a mesh of polygons and a map of displacement values useable to render a textured surface corresponding to the native base surface, the memory device further storing a displacement acceleration module executable by the processor for performing operations comprising;
• precomputing a conservative bounding volume for a polygon of the mesh of polygons, the conservative bounding volume including a portion of a displaced surface;
• identifying, by using (i) the polygon of the native base surface, (ii) at least one real-time displacement parameter value, and (iii) the conservative bounding volume, a plurality of increasingly granular bounding volumes;
• producing a 3D position and a texture coordinate based on an intersection of a query ray with at least one of the plurality of increasingly granular bounding volumes;
• and
• rendering the textured surface using at least one of the 3D position or the texture coordinate for the polygon.

A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing program code executable by a processor to perform operations, the operations comprising:

• accessing a native base surface defined by a mesh of polygons and a map of displacement values useable to render a textured surface;
• precomputing a conservative bounding volume for each polygon of the mesh of polygons, the conservative bounding volume including a portion of a displaced surface;
• a step for producing a 3D position and a texture coordinate for a polygon based on an intersection of a query ray with at least one of a plurality of increasingly granular bounding volumes corresponding to the polygon and associated with the conservative bounding volume;
• selectively using at least one real-time displacement parameter value to identify the at least one of the plurality of increasingly granular bounding volumes;
• and
• rendering the textured surface using at least one of the 3D position or the texture coordinate for the polygon.