DELAYED EXECUTION OF HIT SHADES

Abstract

A ray-tracing system and procedure includes a traversal unit, a hit queue coupled to the traversal unit, and a shading kernel. The hit queue defers the evaluation of hit shading until a predetermined number of hit shading requests are in the queue. A buffer between the hit queue and the shading kernel may contain a sorting unit. The buffer is emptied when full, triggering the shading evaluation. The traversal unit discards the queue contents when a ray encounters an opaque object. The any-hit queue can be memory-based or implemented in software. This approach improves performance for complex scenes that use hit shading without requiring any changes to the application.The system enables efficient ray tracing by postponing costly shading evaluations and increasing the sorting window for shading execution.

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