13 results about "Bounding volume hierarchy" patented technology

In various examples, a supported pattern of triangles may be associated with multiple cluster templates that represent optimized triblock layouts with different levels of compression. In some embodiments, an application running on a host (e.g., a CPU) may specify an applicable compression level for a cluster of triangles or a device (e.g., a GPU) may identify one (e.g., by inspecting the vertex positions on the fly). As such, the device may look up a set of cluster templates associated with a specified pattern of triangles, identify the cluster template associated with the applicable compression level, copy that cluster template into allocated memory for the cluster, copy or transcode the vertex positions in the cluster into a precomputed triblock layout represented by the cluster template, and build a bounding volume hierarchy subtree over the cluster of triangles using a precomputed range assignment represented by the cluster template.

This invention discloses a spatiotemporal data indexing query method, system, medium, and device based on GPU ray tracing, belonging to the field of spatial data indexing technology. The method includes responding to a point query request, obtaining the query coordinates, query time, and target object identifier from the point query request, emitting a vertical ray along a preset direction starting from the query coordinates and starting height, performing GPU ray traversal of the nearest intersection point on the vertical ray using a pre-established spatiotemporal index structure, and returning the intersecting geometric primitive with the smallest ray parameter, whose object identifier matches the target object identifier, and is a valid data record, as the query result of the point query request. This invention achieves hardware acceleration of spatiotemporal indexing query by uniformly mapping two-dimensional spatial coordinates and time dimension to a three-dimensional coordinate system and utilizing a bounding volume hierarchy and its corresponding geometric acceleration structure.

Data for nodes of a bounding volume hierarchy can be represented in fixed-point format for compression. For good precision, fixed-point bounds are stored along with each node, where these bounds represent the minimum and maximum representable numbers in the format. While this provides good compression, there are ways in which this technique can produce undesirable results. For example, if the size of many or most of the bounding volumes in the fixed-point number space is significantly smaller than the bounds, then the representation of such bounding volume in the fixed-point space may be unnecessarily large, resulting in a large number of false positive intersections during BVH traversal. Thus, techniques are provided herein for setting certain bounding volumes as “always hit” in order to eliminate the bounding volumes from inclusion in the fixed-point bounds. This shrinks the fixed-point bounds, giving better precision for smaller bounding volumes.

A method performed by a graphics processor obtains a starting bounding volume hierarchy (BVH), being a data structure comprising nodes representing different 3D regions of space in a modelled environment, the data structure comprising a tree in which the nodes are arranged hierarchically from a root node down to a plurality of leaf nodes, wherein the region modelled by each leaf node encompasses at least one primitive or part of a primitive. The method further comprises performing one or more iterations, starting with a first iteration which starts with the starting BVH as a current BVH, which search for candidate reinsertions to move input nodes to new parents in the tree to reduce expected computational cost.

A processor is provided to perform a raytracing process, wherein the raytracing process includes: determining a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) structure with leaf nodes; storing a plurality of triangles as meshlets in leaf nodes; obtaining a ray tracing acceleration data structure (RTAS) comprising BVH leaf nodes and triangles; transforming vertices of the triangles into a unit ray coordinate space; perform a culling procedure on the transformed triangles; and intersect remaining triangles with a ray in the unit ray space.

A graphics processor includes circuitry configured to generate a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) data structure for a graphics scene to be rendered. The BVH includes a leaf node that includes: quantized primitive information that includes quantized vertex components of primitive children of the leaf node and vertex residual information that includes additional vertex data, exclusive of the quantized primitive information, for the primitive children. The quantized primitive information and the vertex residual information include, for the primitive children, sufficient data to reconstruct an original-precision representation of their vertices. The circuitry may traverse the BVH to perform ray tracing operations during render of the graphics scene, including to perform one or more ray primitive intersect tests based on the quantized primitive information and the vertex residual information.

An apparatus and method for efficiently managing ray tracing to increase performance are contemplated. In various implementations, a ray tracing circuit accesses a ray tracing queue and finds pre-filtering operations. The ray tracing circuit sends a pre-filtering request to an accelerator circuit targeting quantized geometry data. The request includes an identifier of a ray origin and a ray direction, a current intersection distance, a pointer to a memory location storing bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) tree information, an identifier of a corresponding video frame, and an additional pointer or other address indicator of a memory location storing quantized pre-filter information for multiple triangles. The accelerator utilizes its larger amount of hardware resources to execute the pre-filtering operations. Afterward, the ray tracing circuit performs the ray tracing operations using non-pre-filtered geometry data of a reduced number of triangles based on results of the pre-filtering operation performed by the accelerator circuit.

A technique for performing ray tracing operations is provided. The technique includes for a ray being tested for intersection with geometry associated with a bounding volume hierarchy, traversing to a pre-filtering node that includes information for filtering out triangles of a leaf node of the bounding volume hierarchy; evaluating a quantized ray that corresponds to the ray against quantized triangles of the pre-filtering node to filter out one or more triangles of the leaf node from consideration; and testing the triangles of the leaf node that are not filtered out and not testing the triangles of the leaf node that are filtered out.

Apparatus and method for a hierarchical beam tracer. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: a beam generator to generate beam data associated with a beam projected into a graphics scene; a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) generator to generate BVH data comprising a plurality of hierarchically arranged BVH nodes; a hierarchical beam-based traversal unit to determine whether the beam intersects a current BVH node and, if so, to responsively subdivide the beam into N child beams to test against the current BVH node and / or to traverse further down the BVH hierarchy to select a new BVH node, wherein the hierarchical beam-based traversal unit is to iteratively subdivide successive intersecting child beams and / or to continue to traverse down the BVH hierarchy until a leaf node is reached with which at least one final child beam is determined to intersect; the hierarchical beam-based traversal unit to generate a plurality of rays within the final child beam; and intersection hardware logic to perform intersection testing for any rays intersecting the leaf node, the intersection testing to determine intersections between the rays intersecting the leaf node and primitives bounded by the leaf node.

Certain aspects and features of this disclosure relate to modeling shapes using SDF approximation. For example, a method involves partitioning a surface-bounding volume configured to contain the surface of a shape using a volumetric grid. The method also involves approximating, using a basis function, a value of a signed distance function (SDF) for samples taken inside, and on a boundary of, each surface-containing cell of the grid, and storing, based on the sign changes, coordinates for each of the cells. The method further involves constructing a surface-bounding volume hierarchy for the shape by assigning bounding volumes to each of the cells based on the coordinates. The method additionally involves determining an intersection of a ray with each surface-bounding volume in the surface-bounding volume hierarchy and rendering or storing a representation of the shape based on each intersection.

A technique for building a bounding volume hierarchy is disclosed. The technique subdividing a candidate box node based on a resolution to generate a plurality of cells of the candidate box node; identifying a plurality of nodes of a triangle set collection that fit within the cells; generating a plurality of candidate splits based on the plurality of nodes; selecting a candidate split based on a selection criterion to obtain a selected candidate split; and generating child box nodes for a box node of a bounding volume hierarchy under construction, based on the selected candidate split.

In various examples, a device (e.g., a GPU) may be associated with an application programming interface (API) which an application on a host (e.g., a CPU) may use to manage or control generation of bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) subtrees over clusters of triangles using precomputed cluster templates. For example, the application may issue a first type of API call that identifies a supported pattern of triangles, and the API may return an identifier for a set of associated cluster templates and an associated memory size. As such, the application may allocate memory and issue a second type of API call that identifies the cluster vertices, cluster templates, and location of the allocated memory, and the device may use an applicable cluster template to build a BVH-subtree over the cluster in the allocated memory.