Apparatus and method for compressing leaf nodes of a bounding volume hierarchy (bvh)

A method comprising:

• executing graphics instructions including instructions to perform ray tracing operations with a hierarchical acceleration data structure comprising a plurality of hierarchically arranged nodes including lowest level nodes, each of the lowest level nodes comprising pointers to leaf data;
• compressing the lowest level nodes by:
• quantizing the lowest level nodes to generate quantized lowest level nodes;
• and
• storing each quantized lowest level node and associated leaf data without the pointers to the leaf data.

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

• executing graphics instructions including instructions to perform ray tracing operations with a hierarchical acceleration data structure comprising a plurality of hierarchically arranged nodes including lowest level nodes, each of the lowest level nodes comprising pointers to leaf data;
• compressing the lowest level nodes by:
• quantizing the lowest level nodes to generate quantized lowest level nodes;
• and
• storing each quantized lowest level node and associated leaf data without the pointers to the leaf data.