Path tracking for hardware-accelerated ray transforms

Abstract

Techniques are disclosed relating to ray tracing, particularly for path tracking through a bounding volume hierarchy, according to some embodiments. In some embodiments, ray intersection accelerator circuitry traverses a bounding volume hierarchy that includes transform nodes at multiple levels. Ray transform accelerator circuitry may transform ray information based on reaching a given transform node during the traversal. Path tracking hardware may determine a list of pointers to transform nodes in a traversal path taken to reach a first primitive. This may include utilizing at least two buffer circuits to store pointers for a candidate list and a committed list, storing candidate trail information that indicates, for a given position in the candidate list, which buffer stores a corresponding pointer, and storing committed trail information that indicates, for a given position in the committed list, which buffer stores a corresponding pointer.