Ati Technologies Ulc

Advanced Micro Devices Corporation

David William John Pankratz

Michael John Livesley

Daniel James Skinner

David Ronald Oldcorn

Konstantin I Shkurko

David Kirk Mcallister

A technique for performing ray tracing is provided. The technique is applied to a bounding volume hierarchy which comprises a plurality of oriented bounding boxes. The oriented bounding boxes are emulated by translating each oriented bounding box into two or more volumes. After the emulating step, the bounding volume hierarchy is traversed. In some examples, the regular shapes or volumes comprise axis-aligned bounding boxes, cubes or anisotropic rectangles. In one example, the emulating step is performed at run-time using dedicated hardware.

Emulating oriented bounding boxes in bounding volume hierarchies

A technique for performing ray tracing operations is provided. The technique includes identifying triangles to include in a compressed triangle block; storing data common to the identified triangles as common data of the compressed triangle block; and storing data unique to the identified triangles as unique data of the compressed triangle block.

Bounding volume hierarchy leaf node compression

An implementation comprises traversing a bounding volume hierarchy for each ray of a plurality of rays concurrently using a plurality of execution items. In response to determining that a first execution item of the plurality of execution items is finished traversing the bounding volume hierarchy for a first ray of the plurality rays, the embodiment causes the first execution item to traverse the bounding volume hierarchy for a second ray of the plurality of rays while a second execution item of the plurality of execution items traverses the bounding volume hierarchy for the second ray. And the embodiment comprises initiating side-effects with the first and second execution items in an order indicated by the bounding volume hierarchy.

Traversing multiple regions of a bounding volume hierarchy in parallel

Devices and methods for node traversal for ray tracing are provided, which comprise casting a first ray in a space comprising objects represented by geometric shapes, traversing, for the first ray, at least one first node of an accelerated hierarchy structure representing an approximate volume of a group of the geometric shapes and a second node representing a volume of one of the geometric shapes, casting a second ray in the space, selecting, for the second ray, a starting node of traversal based on locations of intersection of the first ray and the second ray and an identifier which identifies one or more nodes intersected by the first ray and traversing, for the second ray, the accelerated hierarchy structure beginning at the starting node of traversal.

Dynamic node traversal order for ray tracing

A technique for performing ray tracing operations is provided. The technique includes, in response to detecting that a threshold number of traversal stage work-items of a wavefront have terminated, increasing intersection test parallelization for non-terminated work-items.

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Markham, Canada

David William John Pankratz