Intel Corporation

Intel IP Corporation

Sven Woop

Carsten Benthin

Karthik Vaidyanathan

Ingo Wald

Prasoonkumar Surti

Gabor Liktor

Johannes Guenther

Attila Afra

Saikat Mandal

Scott R Janus

Philip R Laws

Karol A Szerszen

Abhishek R Appu

Tomas G Akenine-Moller

Joshua D Barczak

Joshua Barczak

Rasmus Barringer

Holger Gruen

Won-Jong Lee

Pawel Majewski

Joydeep Ray

Subramaniam M Maiyuran

Adam T Lake

James A Valerio

John G Gierach

Stephen Junkins

Thomas F Raoux

Michael Doyle

Timothy R Bauer

Jiasheng Chen

Weiyu Chen

Sreenivas Kothandaraman

Radoslaw Drabinski

Bret G Alfieri

Apparatus and method for camera-aware BVH re-braiding. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: ray tracing acceleration hardware to be used to determine ray traversal results when traversing a ray through a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH); and BVH processing hardware logic to modify the BVH to reduce spatial overlap between one or more BVH subtrees based on a detected camera position to produce a modified BVH.

Apparatus and method for acceleration data structure re-braiding with camera position

One embodiment provides a graphics processor including a processing resource including a register file, memory, a cache memory, and load/store/cache circuitry to process load, store, and prefetch messages from the processing resource. The circuitry includes support for an immediate address offset that will be used to adjust the address supplied for a memory access to be requested by the circuitry. Including support for the immediate address offset removes the need to execute additional instructions to adjust the address to be accessed prior to execution of the memory access instruction.

Immediate offset of load store and atomic instructions

Apparatus and method for box-box testing. For example, one embodiment of a processor comprises: a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) generator to construct a BVH comprising a plurality of hierarchically arranged BVH nodes; traversal circuitry to traverse query boxes through the BVH, the traversal circuitry to read a BVH node from a top of a BVH node stack and to read a query box from a local storage or memory, the traversal circuitry further comprising: box-box testing circuitry and/or logic to compare maximum and minimum X, Y, and Z coordinates of the BVH node and the query box and to generate an overlap indication if overlap is detected for each of the X, Y, and Z dimensions; distance determination circuitry and/or logic to generate a distance value representing an extent of overlap between the BVH node and the query box; and sorting circuitry and/or logic to sort the BVH node within a set of one or more additional BVH nodes based on the distance value.

Apparatus and method for performing box queries in ray traversal hardware

A graphics processing apparatus comprising bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) construction circuitry to perform a spatial analysis and temporal analysis related to a plurality of input primitives and responsively generate a BVH comprising spatial, temporal, and spatial-temporal components that are hierarchically arranged, wherein the spatial components include a plurality of spatial nodes with children, the spatial nodes bounding the children using spatial bounds, and the temporal components comprise temporal nodes with children, the temporal nodes bounding their children using temporal bounds and the spatial-temporal components comprise spatial-temporal nodes with children, the spatial-temporal nodes bounding their children using spatial and temporal bounds; and ray traversal/intersection circuitry to traverse a ray or a set of rays through the BVH in accordance with the spatial and temporal components.

Temporal data structures in a ray tracing architecture

Apparatus and method for lossy displaced mesh compression. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: displacement mapping circuitry/logic to generate an original displacement-mapped mesh by performing a displacement mapping of a plurality of vertices of a base subdivision mesh; and mesh compression circuitry/logic to compress the original displacement-mapped mesh, the mesh compression circuitry/logic comprising a quantizer to quantize the displacement mapping of the plurality of vertices in view of a base mesh to generate a displacement array.

Apparatus and method for displaced mesh compression

Apparatus and method for stable and short latency sorting. For example, one embodiment of a processor comprises: an input circuit to receive a set of N input values to be sorted into a sorted order; comparison circuitry to compare each input value with all other input values in parallel to generate at least N*(N−1)/2 comparison result values; matrix generation circuitry and/or logic to generate a result matrix having a row associated with each input value, a plurality of bits in each row comprising comparison result values indicating results of comparisons with other input values, wherein a first region of the result matrix is to store a first set of bits comprising the N*(N−1)/2 comparison result values and a second region of the result matrix, opposite the first region, is to store a second set of bits comprising an inverse of the N*(N−1)/2 comparison result values; a parallel adder circuit to perform parallel additions of the bits in each row to generate N unique result values; and sorting circuitry to index into the N unique result values to return the sorted order.

Apparatus and method for performing a stable and short latency sorting operation

Apparatus and method for grouping rays based on quantized ray directions. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: An apparatus comprising: a ray generator to generate a plurality of rays; ray direction evaluation circuitry/logic to generate approximate ray direction data for each of the plurality of rays; ray sorting circuitry/logic to sort the rays into a plurality of ray queues based, at least in part, on the approximate ray direction data.

Apparatus and method for quantized convergent direction-based ray sorting

Apparatus and method for programmable ray tracing with hardware acceleration on a graphics processor. For example, one embodiment of a graphics processor comprises shader execution circuitry to execute a plurality of programmable ray tracing shaders. The shader execution circuitry includes a plurality of single instruction multiple data (SIMD) execution units. Sorting circuitry regroups data associated with one or more of the programmable ray tracing shaders to increase occupancy for SIMD operations performed by the SIMD execution units; and fixed-function intersection circuitry coupled to the shader execution circuitry detects intersections between rays and bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) and/or objects contained therein and to provide results indicating the intersections to the sorting circuitry.

Apparatus and method for cross-instance front-to-back traversal for ray tracing heavily-instanced scenes

Apparatus and method for efficient graphics processing including ray tracing. For example, one embodiment of a graphics processor comprises: execution hardware logic to execute graphics commands and render images; an interface to couple functional units of the execution hardware logic to a tiled resource; and a tiled resource manager to manage access by the functional units to the tiled resource, a functional unit of the execution hardware logic to generate a request with a hash identifier (ID) to request access to a portion of the tiled resource, wherein the tiled resource manager is to determine whether a portion of the tiled resource identified by the hash ID exists, and if not, to allocate a new portion of the tiled resource and associate the new portion with the hash ID.

Apparatus and method for efficient graphics processing including ray tracing

An apparatus and method for efficiently reconstructing a BVH. For example, one embodiment of a method comprises: constructing an object bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) for each object in a scene, each object BVH including a root node and one or more child nodes based on primitives included in each object; constructing a top-level BVH using the root nodes of the individual object BVHs; performing an analysis of the top-level BVH to determine whether the top-level BVH comprises a sufficiently efficient arrangement of nodes within its hierarchy; and reconstructing at least a portion of the top-level BVH if a more efficient arrangement of nodes exists, wherein reconstructing comprises rebuilding the portion of the top-level BVH until one or more stopping criteria have been met, the stopping criteria defined to prevent an entire rebuilding of the top-level BVH.

Apparatus and method for efficiently merging bounding volume hierarchy data

Cluster of acceleration engines to accelerate intersections. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: a set of graphics cores to execute a first set of instructions of a primary graphics thread; a scalar cluster comprising a plurality of scalar execution engines; and a communication fabric interconnecting the set of graphics cores and the scalar cluster; the set of graphics cores to offload execution of a second set of instructions associated with ray traversal and/or intersection operations to the scalar cluster; the scalar cluster comprising a plurality of local memories, each local memory associated with one of the scalar execution engines, wherein each local memory is to store a portion of a hierarchical acceleration data structure required by an associated scalar execution engine to execute one or more of the second set of instructions; the plurality of scalar execution engines to store results of the execution of the second set of instructions in a memory accessible by the set of graphics cores; wherein the set of graphics cores are to process the results within the primary graphics thread.

Cluster of scalar engines to accelerate intersection in leaf node

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

Apparatus and method for preventing re-traversal of a prior path on a restart. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: a ray generator to generate a plurality of rays in a graphics scene; a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) generator to construct a BVH comprising a plurality of hierarchically arranged nodes, wherein the BVH comprises a specified number of child nodes at a current BVH level beneath a parent node in the hierarchy; circuitry to traverse one or more of the rays through the BVH to form a current traversal path and intersect the one or more rays with primitives contained within the nodes, wherein the circuitry is to process entries from the top of a first data structure comprising entries each associated with a child node at the current BVH level, the entries being ordered from top to bottom based on a sorted distance of each respective child node.

Growing community of inventors

Völklingen, Germany

Sven Woop