Ray tracing device based on a pixel processing element and method thereof

Abstract

A pixel processing element (PPE)-based ray tracing device, includes an internal shared memory for receiving and storing image data to be rendered; a PPE processor for performing parallel ray tracing on the image data on a pixel-by-pixel basis; and a shading processor for accumulatively calculating color values of respective pixels obtained by ray tracing and determining a final color value of each pixel. Further, A PPE-based ray tracing method, includes receiving image data to be rendered on a frame-by-frame basis; storing data having a high frequency of use among the input data in a hierarchical cache; performing parallel ray tracing on image data of each pixel stored in the hierarchical cache on a frame-by-frame basis; calculating a color value of each pixel from first and second rays and a direct ray in accordance with the ray tracing result, and accumulating the color values to obtain the color value of each pixel.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.