Apparatus and method for implementing bounding volume hierarchy (bvh) operations on tesselation hardware

A method comprising:

• generating a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) for an input surface using tessellation hardware;
• performing intersection tests for the input surface using the BVH to determine whether there are intersections between a ray and the input surface;
• if there are no intersections, the culling the input surface,
• if there is an intersection, then providing surface tessellation factors and an indication of the intersected primitives to the tessellation hardware;
• tessellating the input surface to generate one or more of the intersected primitives;
• and
• outputting the intersected primitives to a domain shader.

A machine-readable medium having program code stored thereon which, when executed by a machine, causes the machine to perform the operations of:

• generating a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) for an input surface using tessellation hardware;
• performing intersection tests for the input surface using the BVH to determine whether there are intersections between a ray and the input surface;
• if there are no intersections, the culling the input surface,
• if there is an intersection, then providing surface tessellation factors and an indication of the intersected primitives to the tessellation hardware;
• tessellating the input surface to generate one or more of the intersected primitives;
• and
• outputting the intersected primitives to a domain shader.