Intel Corporation

Advanced Micro Devices Corporation

Joshua D Barczak

Michael Apodaca

Kai Xiao

Carson Brownlee

Thomas F Raoux

Carsten Benthin

Gabor Liktor

Prasoonkumar Surti

Karthik Vaidyanathan

Travis T Schluessler

Sven Woop

Saikat Mandal

Philip R Laws

Diego Fernandes Nehab

Timothy Rowley

Pedro V Sander

Christopher Oat

Shopf Jeremy

An apparatus and method for merging primitives and coordinating between vertex and ray transformations on a shared transformation unit. For example, one embodiment of a graphics processor comprises: a queue comprising a plurality of entries; ordering circuitry/logic to order triangles front to back within the queue; pairing circuitry/logic to identify triangles in the queue sharing an edge and to merge the triangles sharing an edge to produce merged triangle pairs; and shared transformation circuitry to alternate between performing vertex transformations on vertices of the merged triangle pairs and to performing ray transformations on ray direction/origin data.

Apparatus and method using triangle pairs and shared transformation circuitry to improve ray tracing performance

An apparatus and method to execute ray tracing instructions. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises execution circuitry to execute a dequantize instruction to convert a plurality of quantized data values to a plurality of dequantized data values, the dequantize instruction including a first source operand to identify a plurality of packed quantized data values in a source register and a destination operand to identify a destination register in which to store a plurality of packed dequantized data values, wherein the execution circuitry is to convert each packed quantized data value in the source register to a floating point value, to multiply the floating point value by a first value to generate a first product and to add the first product to a second value to generate a dequantized data value, and to store the dequantized data value in a packed data element location in the destination register.

Apparatus and method for ray tracing instruction processing and execution

Real time ray tracing-based adaptive multi frequency shading. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprising: rasterization hardware logic to process input data for an image in a deferred rendering pass and to responsively update one or more graphics buffers with first data to be used in a subsequent rendering pass; ray tracing hardware logic to perform ray tracing operations using the first data to generate reflection ray data and to store the reflection ray data in a reflection buffer; and image rendering circuitry to perform texture sampling in a texture buffer based on the reflection ray data in the reflection buffer to render an output image.

Real time ray tracing (RTRT)-based adaptive multi-frequency shading (AMFS)

Apparatus and method for acceleration data structure refit. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: a ray generator to generate a plurality of rays in a first graphics scene; a hierarchical acceleration data structure generator to construct an acceleration data structure comprising a plurality of hierarchically arranged nodes including inner nodes and leaf nodes stored in a memory in a depth-first search (DFS) order; traversal hardware logic to traverse one or more of the rays through the acceleration data structure; intersection hardware logic to determine intersections between the one or more rays and one or more primitives within the hierarchical acceleration data structure; a node refit unit comprising circuitry and/or logic to read consecutively through at least the inner nodes in the memory in reverse DFS order to perform a bottom-up refit operation on the hierarchical acceleration data structure.

Apparatus and method for acceleration data structure refit

Apparatus and method for context-aware compression. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: ray traversal/intersection circuitry to traverse rays through a hierarchical acceleration data structure to identify intersections between rays and primitives of a graphics scene; matrix compression circuitry/logic to compress hierarchical transformation matrices to generate compressed hierarchical transformation matrices by quantizing N-bit floating point data elements associated with child transforms of the hierarchical transformation matrices to variable-bit floating point numbers or integers comprising offsets from a parent transform of the child transform; and an instance processor to generate a plurality of instances of one or more base geometric objects in accordance with the compressed hierarchical transformation matrices.

Context-aware compression with quantization of hierarchical transform matrices

Apparatus and method for bottom-up BVH refit. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: a hierarchical acceleration data structure generator to construct an acceleration data structure comprising a plurality of hierarchically arranged nodes; traversal hardware logic to traverse one or more rays through the acceleration data structure; intersection hardware logic to determine intersections between the one or more rays and one or more primitives within the hierarchical acceleration data structure; a node unit comprising circuitry and/or logic to perform refit operations on nodes of the hierarchical acceleration data structure, the refit operations to adjust spatial dimensions of one or more of the nodes; and an early termination evaluator to determine whether to proceed with refit operations or to terminate refit operations for a current node based on refit data associated with one or more child nodes of the current node.

Early termination in bottom-up acceleration data structure refit

Cloud-based real time rendering. For example, one embodiment of a system comprises: a first graphics processing node to perform a first set of graphics processing operations to render a graphics scene, the first set of graphics processing operations comprising ray-tracing independent operations; an interconnect or network interface coupling the first graphics processing node to a second graphics processing node; the second graphics processing node to receive an indication of a current view of a user of the first graphics processing node and to receive or construct a view-independent surface generated by view-independent ray traversal and intersection operations; the second graphics processing node to responsively perform a view-dependent translation of the view-independent surface based on the current view of the user to generate a view-dependent surface and to provide the view-dependent surface to the first graphics processing node; and the first graphics processing node to perform a second set of graphics processing operations to complete rendering of the graphics scene using the view-dependent surface.

Cloud-based realtime raytracing

Multi-pass apparatus and method for ray tracing shading. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: graphics processing circuitry to execute a sequence of visibility testing operations related to texels within a texture domain to generate visibility results; a register or memory to store a texel mask; texel mask update circuitry/logic to update the texel mask based on the visibility results, the texel mask comprising a plurality of bits to indicate visibility of the texels within the texture domain, the texel mask update circuitry/logic to set a first bit to indicate whether any bits in the texel mask indicate a visible texel; a shader dispatcher to initiate conditional dispatch operations only if the first bit is set to indicate that at least one bit in the texel mask indicates a visible texel, wherein to perform the conditional dispatch operations, the shader dispatcher is to dispatch texel shaders for only those texels that the texel mask indicates may be visible; and a plurality of execution units (EUs) to execute the shaders dispatched by the shader dispatcher.

Multi-pass apparatus and method for early termination of graphics shading

A method and apparatus for sorting data into spatial bins or buckets using a graphics processing unit (GPU). The method takes unsorted point data as input and scatters the points, in sorted order, into a set of bins. This key operation enables construction of a spatial data structure that is useful for applications such as particle simulation or collision detection. The disclosed method achieves better performance scaling than previous methods by exploiting geometry shaders to progressively trim the size of a working set. The method also leverages predicated rendering functionality to allow early termination without CPU/GPU synchronization. Furthermore, unlike previous techniques, the method can guarantee sorted output without requiring sorted input. This allows the method to be used to implement a form of bucket sort using the GPU.

Method and apparatus for spatial binning on a GPU and global path planning to avoid spatially binned objects

Presented are systems and methods that change the order in which triangles are rendered, to improve post-transform vertex cache efficiency and reduce view-independent overdraw. The resulting triangle orders are orders magnitude faster to compute compared to previous methods. The improvements in processing speed allow such methods to be performed on a model after it is loaded (i.e., when more information on the host hardware is available). Also, such methods can be executed interactively, allowing for re-optimization in case of changes to geometry or topology, which happen often in CAD/CAM applications.

Growing community of inventors

Milford, MA, United States of America

Joshua D Barczak