Nvidia Corporation

William Newhall

Samuli Matias Laine

Shirish C Gadre

Tero Tapani Karras

John Matthew Burgess

Steven James Heinrich

Ignacio Llamas

Ronald Charles Babich, Jr

Michael Alan Fetterman

Greg Muthler

Omkar Paranjape

Stefano A Pescador

Ramesh Jandhyala

Mark Alan Gebhart

Poorna Rao

A texture processing pipeline in a graphics processing unit generates the surface appearance for objects in a computer-generated scene. This texture processing pipeline determines, at multiple stages within the texture processing pipeline, whether texture operations and texture loads may be processed at an accelerated rate. At each stage that includes a decision point, the texture processing pipeline assumes that the current texture operation or texture load can be accelerated unless specific, known information indicates that the texture operation or texture load cannot be accelerated. As a result, the texture processing pipeline increases the number of texture operations and texture loads that are accelerated relative to the number of texture operations and texture loads that are not accelerated.

Techniques for performing accelerated point sampling in a texture processing pipeline

A hardware-based traversal coprocessor provides acceleration of tree traversal operations searching for intersections between primitives represented in a tree data structure and a ray. The primitives may include opaque and alpha triangles used in generating a virtual scene. The hardware-based traversal coprocessor is configured to determine primitives intersected by the ray, and return intersection information to a streaming multiprocessor for further processing. The hardware-based traversal coprocessor is configured to provide a deterministic result of intersected triangles regardless of the order that the memory subsystem returns triangle range blocks for processing, while opportunistically eliminating alpha intersections that lie further along the length of the ray than closer opaque intersections.

Method for handling of out-of-order opaque and alpha ray/primitive intersections

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Woodside, CA, United States of America

William Newhall