US 11,721,059 B2
Apparatus and method for cross-instance front-to-back traversal for ray tracing heavily-instanced scenes
Ingo Wald, Salt Lake City, UT (US); Carsten Benthin, Voelklingen (DE); and Sven Woop, Volklingen (DE)
Assigned to INTEL CORPORATION, Santa Clara, CA (US)
Filed by INTEL CORPORATION, Santa Clara, CA (US)
Filed on Sep. 13, 2021, as Appl. No. 17/473,770.
Application 17/473,770 is a continuation of application No. 16/145,162, filed on Sep. 27, 2018, granted, now 11,120,608.
Prior Publication US 2022/0068009 A1, Mar. 3, 2022
This patent is subject to a terminal disclaimer.
Int. Cl. G06T 15/06 (2011.01); G06T 7/50 (2017.01); G06T 15/00 (2011.01); G06T 15/50 (2011.01); G06T 1/20 (2006.01)
CPC G06T 15/06 (2013.01) [G06T 7/50 (2017.01); G06T 15/005 (2013.01); G06T 15/506 (2013.01); G06T 1/20 (2013.01); G06T 2210/21 (2013.01)] 20 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. A graphics processing apparatus comprising:
ray tracing circuitry to construct a hierarchical acceleration structure over a plurality of instances of one or more base geometric objects, the hierarchical acceleration structure comprising a plurality of nodes arranged in a hierarchy, the plurality of instances comprising a first instance and a second instance each includes one or more nodes of the plurality of nodes; and
traversal circuitry to perform ray traversal on the hierarchical acceleration structure using a ray, wherein the ray traversal is performed based on a traversal queue that orders nodes in the plurality of instances based on distances of the nodes to a ray origin of the ray, wherein the ray traversal is performed on a first node in the first instance, followed by a second node in the second instance, wherein the second node in the second instance is traversed ahead of a third node in the first instance based on the traversal queue.