Efficient batching for bounding volume hierarchy build operations

Abstract

Ray tracing workloads utilize bounding volume hierarchies as an acceleration structure for efficiency. These structures are built for scene geometry. The build operations are batched together and executed in parallel. Such operations are performed in a set of phases separated by synchronization barriers. An important issue with such batching is that BVH build operations have a wide range of execution times. Due to the barriers, slower BVH builds can cause delays in BVH builds that would otherwise complete more quickly. For this reason, instead of batching build requests together regardless of how long they might take to execute, a driver sorts BVH build requests into bins based on a sorting criterion which acts as a proxy for execution time. Because barriers only apply to bins they are in, barriers apply for work that is estimated to complete in a similar amount of time, alleviating the above issue.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.