HARDWARE ACCELERATION FOR BEAM TRACKING WITH TRANSFORMATIONS IN ALTERNATIVE SPACE

摘要

Improved techniques applicable to a hardware accelerator for ray tracing for traversing a hierarchical acceleration structure are disclosed. The traversal efficiency of such hardware accelerators is improved, for example, by transforming a ray in hardware from the coordinate space of the ray into two or more coordinate spaces at corresponding points when traversing the hierarchical acceleration structure. In one example, the hardware accelerator is configured to transform a ray received by a processor from space to at least one alternate space and then to object space in hardware before returning corresponding ray-primitive intersection results to the processor. The techniques disclosed herein facilitate the use of additional coordinate spaces to orient accelerating structures in a way that they more efficiently approximate the space occupied by the underlying primitives being ray traced.