Ray management

Abstract

A processor comprising a processing module a ray engine that comprises a ray store, ray-tracing circuitry and control logic. The control logic receives a plurality of batches of ray descriptors supplied from the processing module, each batch comprising respective ray descriptors of a plurality of modelled rays and allocates ray descriptors to address space of the ray store in blocks of ray descriptors with each block being a subset of the ray descriptors in the batch. For each batch of ray descriptors, the raytracing circuitry processes, using ray tracing, each of the rays of the batch based on the respective ray descriptors stored in the ray store and for each block, the control logic deallocates the memory allocated to the block in response to the processing of all the rays in the block being finished by the ray-tracing engine. A method of such processing is also claimed. (Figure 4 to accompany)