Bounding volume hierarchy caching by storing topology

Abstract

In order to perform ray tracing operations, a ray tracing pipeline uses one or more bounding volume hierarchies (“BVHs”) that act as an acceleration structure for accessing the geometry of a scene. In applications such as video games, simulations, or other real-time applications, geometry of the scene changes frequently such as at every frame. Thus, to have appropriate information for ray tracing, a BVH is built quite frequently. Such an operation is an expensive one. Thus, efficient techniques for BVH construction are desirable. Thus, techniques are provided herein for BVH caching BVH information. In general, these caching operations store portions of a BVH in a cache when such portions are initially encountered. Later, when that geometry is re-accessed, the caching operations search the cache for the BVH portions in the cache and uses such BVH portions if found. In some examples, the BVH cache persists between application executions.

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