Hardware Compression for BVH Morton Codes and Primitive References

The patent segments the scene into multiple bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) structures organized in a tree format, allowing ray traversal to be divided into hierarchical levels. This segmentation enables the system to quickly eliminate large portions of the scene that do not intersect with the ray, reducing overall computational requirements while maintaining rendering quality.

The patent performs preliminary compression of BVH data using Morton code encoding and quantization before ray tracing operations. By pre-processing and organizing scene data into an optimized structure with reduced memory footprint, the system prepares the data in advance to enable faster traversal and reduce computational overhead during actual ray tracing execution.

The patent applies quantization to transform floating-point BVH data into lower-precision integer representations, changing the data parameters to reduce memory access time and increase processing speed. This parameter transformation maintains sufficient accuracy for intersection detection while enabling faster computational operations and reduced memory bandwidth requirements.

The patent introduces Morton code (Z-order curve) encoding to spatially organize BVH nodes, adding a dimensional organization layer that enables cache-friendly memory access patterns. This dimensional reorganization allows the hardware to traverse the BVH structure more efficiently by exploiting spatial locality, reducing memory access latency while maintaining intersection accuracy.