Apparatus and method for ray tracing with block floating point data

Abstract

Systems and methods include high throughput and/or parallelized ray/geometric shape intersection testing using intersection testing resources accepting and operating with block floating point data. Block floating point data sacrifices precision of scene location in ways that maintain precision where more beneficial, and allow reduced precision where beneficial. In particular, rays, acceleration structures, and primitives can be represented in a variety of block floating point formats, such that storage requirements for storing such data can be reduced. Hardware accelerated intersection testing can be provided with reduced sized math units, with reduced routing requirements. A driver for hardware accelerators can maintain full-precision versions of rays and primitives to allow reduced communication requirements for high throughput intersection testing in loosely coupled systems. Embodiments also can include using BFP formatted data in programmable test cells or more general purpose processing elements.