Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Martin Jon Irwin Fuller

Daniel Gilbert Kennett

Ivan Nevraev

John David White

A ray trace operation includes tracing a ray from an origin point in accordance with a ray path into a virtual environment (where the virtual environment comprises one or more virtual objects defined by one or more object components) and determining an intersected object component of the one or more object components that the ray intersects with. Determining the intersected object component comprises accessing (i) ray trace temporal coherence data based upon a preceding ray trace operation that temporally precedes the ray trace operation or (ii) ray trace spatial coherence data based upon a spatially proximate ray trace operation.

Temporal and spatial coherence in ray tracing

Examples described herein relate to rendering an image using a reduced fidelity of shading for portions of a triangle that are potentially occluded by other objects. A computer device may pre-populate a potentially occluded depth map in a graphics processing unit (GPU) for a current frame based on depth data of a previous frame, a low resolution depth pre-pass, or a rasterizing occlusion geometry. The GPU may determine, at a rasterization stage, that a depth of a portion of a triangle being processed is further than a depth of a corresponding tile in the potentially occluded depth map. The GPU may decrease a fidelity of shading applied to at least the portion of the triangle in comparison to a specified fidelity for the triangle in response to determining that the depth of the portion of the triangle is further than the depth of the corresponding tile.

Potentially occluded rasterization

A system for facilitating ray trace operations with shared traversal performs a pre-test operation that includes testing one or more volumes against an acceleration structure associated with a virtual environment to identify a set of candidate nodes of the acceleration structure. The virtual environment comprises one or more virtual objects defined by one or more object components. The system also performs a ray trace operation based upon the set of candidate nodes of the acceleration structure.

Ray tracing with shared traversal

Data compression techniques are described for saving memory space by using fewer bits to store information while achieving high fidelity. A data set may be partitioned into a plurality of regions. Locally varying numerical ranges of data values (e.g., the minimum and maximum extents) may be determined for the plurality of regions. The data in the individual regions may be encoded using a lower number of bits as interpolation values in reference to the local extents rather than being encoded using a higher number of bits as absolute values. Where there are multiple channels of data in the regions, the number of available bits for encoding the data may be dynamically allocated per region based on the relative degrees of variance in data among the multiple channels.

Locally varying numerical ranges for data compression

A method of rendering image frames on a computing system includes rendering an initial frame having a plurality of pixels and determining a low-resolution shading rate for at least one object in the frame or at least a portion of the frame based on at least one metric of the initial frame. The method further includes identifying a shading block having a plurality of pixels based on the low-resolution shading rate and sampling a texture data of the surface associated with the shading block wherein a texture sampling rate is at least two. The average of the texture samples is then applied to the pixels associated with the shading block. The method further includes shading the pixels in the shading block and displaying an output frame on a display device.

Systems and methods of texture super sampling for low-rate shading

Methods and devices for generating hardware compatible compressed textures may include accessing, at runtime of an application program, graphics hardware incompatible compressed textures in a format incompatible with a graphics processing unit (GPU). The methods and devices may include converting the graphics hardware incompatible compressed textures directly into hardware compatible compressed textures usable by the GPU using a trained machine learning model.

Machine learning applied to textures compression or upscaling

Examples described herein relate to rendering a full resolution image using a reduced resolution depth pre-pass to pre-populate depth data for culling. A computing device may include a memory, a graphics processing unit (GPU) including a hierarchical depth buffer or full resolution depth data, and at least one processor. The computer device may render an occlusion geometry at a reduced resolution. The computer device may be configured to sample a depth value of pixels of the occlusion geometry. The computer device may pre-populate the GPU depth data based on the sampled depth values. The computer device may cull at least one tile or pixel from a full resolution rendering process in response to a depth of the at least one tile or pixel being further than a corresponding depth value in the GPU depth data. The computer device may perform the full resolution rendering process on remaining tiles or pixels.

Low resolution depth pre-pass

Methods and devices for real time texture compression may include accessing graphics hardware incompatible compressed textures in a format incompatible with the GPU, and a metadata file associated with the graphics hardware incompatible compressed textures, wherein the metadata file includes at least one hint that provides information to use for compression of decompressed textures from the graphics hardware incompatible compressed textures into hardware compatible compressed textures. The methods and devices may include converting the graphics hardware incompatible compressed textures into the decompressed textures. The methods and devices may include selectively compressing the decompressed textures into the hardware compatible compressed textures usable by the GPU according to the at least one hint from the metadata file. The methods and devices may include transmitting the hardware compatible compressed textures to the GPU.

Reducing the search space for real time texture compression

Methods and devices for rendering visible primitives in a scene of an application may include loading a primitive visibility buffer that includes a plurality of primitives representing at least one instance in a scene of the application. The primitive visibility buffer may include for each primitive of the plurality of primitives a visibility bit that describes a visibility state as visible or not visible for each of the plurality primitives. The methods and devices may include determining whether each of the plurality of primitives are visible in the scene based on the visibility bit, rendering a primitive when the visibility bit for the primitive indicates that the primitive is visible, and skipping the rendering of the primitive when the visibility bit indicates that the primitive is not visible. The methods and devices may also include combing pre-computed visibility states with runtime visibility testing when rendering the visibility bits.

Compact visibility state for GPUs compatible with hardware instancing

Flexible, dynamic, and efficient compression and de-compression mechanisms are described. An example compression mechanism includes reading a plurality of groups of indices, identifying a smallest index in each of the plurality of groups, rotating indices in each of the plurality of groups such that the smallest index is a first value, calculating unsigned delta encoded values relative to the smallest index in each of the plurality of groups for remaining indices, converting the plurality of groups of indices into a plurality of compressed groups of indices, and storing the plurality of compressed groups of indices. An example de-compression mechanism include reading a plurality of compressed groups of indices, identifying a first index as an absolute value in each of the plurality of groups, calculating remaining indices of each of the plurality of groups, and converting the plurality of compressed groups of indices into a plurality of decompressed groups of indices.

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Warwick, United Kingdom

Martin Jon Irwin Fuller