Nvidia Corporation

Eric Enderton

Henry Packard Moreton

Eric Brian Lum

Kayvon Fatahalian

Yong He

Yury Y Uralsky

Marco Salvi

Aaron Eliot Lefohn

Anjul Patney

Christopher Ryan Wyman

Daniel Elliot Wexler

Larry I Gritz

G Evan Hart, Jr

Yubo Zhang

Philip Nemec

Radomir Mech

Samuli Matias Laine

David Patrick Luebke

Timo Oskari Aila

John Matthew Burgess

Cass Watson Everitt

Gregory Muthler

Morgan McGuire

Peter Schuyler Shirley

Jonathan Cohen

Nikhil Dixit

John F Schlag

Josh Noel

To improve the efficiency of bounding volumes in a hardware based ray tracer, we employ a sheared axis-aligned bounding box to approximate an oriented bounding box typically defined by rotations. To achieve this, the bounding volume hierarchy builder shears an axis-aligned box to fit tightly around its enclosed oriented geometry in top level or bottom level space, then computes the inverse shear transform. The bounds are still stored as axis-aligned boxes in memory, now defined in the new sheared coordinate system, along with the derived parameters to transform a ray into the sheared coordinate system before testing intersection with the boxes. The ray-bounding volume intersection test is performed as usual, just in the new sheared coordinate system. Additional efficiencies are gained by constraining the number of shear dimensions, constraining the shear transform coefficients to a quantized list, sharing a shear transform across a collection of bounds, performing a shear transform only for ray-bounds testing and not for ray-geometry intersection testing, and adding a specialized shear transform calculator/accelerator to the hardware.

Efficiency of ray-box tests

One embodiment of the present invention includes a parallel processing unit (PPU) that performs pixel shading at variable granularities. For effects that vary at a low frequency across a pixel block, a coarse shading unit performs the associated shading operations on a subset of the pixels in the pixel block. By contrast, for effects that vary at a high frequency across the pixel block, fine shading units perform the associated shading operations on each pixel in the pixel block. Because the PPU implements coarse shading units and fine shading units, the PPU may tune the shading rate per-effect based on the frequency of variation across each pixel group. By contrast, conventional PPUs typically compute all effects per-pixel, performing redundant shading operations for low frequency effects. Consequently, to produce similar image quality, the PPU consumes less power and increases the rendering frame rate compared to a conventional PPU.

Adaptive shading in a graphics processing pipeline

A system, method, and computer program product are provided for shading using a dynamic object-space grid. An object defined by triangle primitives in a three-dimensional (3D) space that is specific to the object is received and an object-space shading grid is defined for a first triangle primitive of the triangle primitives based on coordinates of the first triangle primitive in the 3D space. A shader program is executed by a processing pipeline to compute a shaded value at a point on the object-space shading grid for the first triangle primitive.

System, method, and computer program product for shading using a dynamic object-space grid

A system, method, and computer program product are provided for performing object-space shading. A primitive defined by vertices in three-dimensional (3D) space that is specific to an object defined by at least the primitive is received and a shading sample rate is computed for the primitive based on a screen-space derivative of coordinates of a pixel fragment transformed into the 3D space. A shader program is executed by a processing pipeline to compute shaded attributes for the primitive according to the computed shading sample rate.

System, method, and computer program product for performing object-space shading

A system, method, and computer program product are provided for reducing noise in an image using depth-based on sweeping over image samples. In use, each noisy pixel of an image having noise is identified. Additionally, for each noisy pixel, at least one sample included in each of a plurality of neighboring pixels to the noisy pixel is identified. Furthermore, the samples are swept over at least partially in a depth-based order to identify a value for the noisy pixel that reduces the noise.

System, method, and computer program product for reducing noise in an image using depth-based sweeping over image samples

A system, method, and computer program product are provided for rendering pixels with multiple semi-transparent surfaces. In use, a pixel is identified. Additionally, an operation to generate a plurality of samples for the pixel is performed. Further, a subset of the samples for each of at least one semi-transparent surface associated with the pixel is selected at least in part in a random manner. Moreover, the pixel is rendered utilizing the selected subset of the samples for each of the at least one semi-transparent surface.

System, method, and computer program product for rendering pixels with at least one semi-transparent surface

In an example embodiment, 3D graphics object information associated with a render of a frame may be stored in an object-indexed cache in a memory. The 3D graphics object information comprises results for one or more shading operations further comprises one or more input values for the one or more shading operations.

Re-render acceleration of frame with lighting change

Embodiments of methods, apparatuses, devices, and/or systems for load balancing two processors, such as for graphics and/or video processing, for example, are described.

Load balancing

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Berkeley, CA, United States of America

Eric Enderton