Intel Corporation
APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR DOUBLE-PRECISION RAY TRAVERSAL IN A RAY TRACING PIPELINE

Abstract:

Apparatus and method for double-precision traversal and intersection. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) generator to construct a BVH comprising a plurality of hierarchically arranged BVH nodes; a ray storage to store rays to be traversed through one or more of the BVH nodes; ray traversal circuitry comprising a first plurality of 64-bit arithmetic logic units (ALUs) which natively support double-precision floating point operations, the ray traversal circuitry to use at least a first ALU of the one or more ALUs to traverse a first ray through a first BVH node at a double-precision floating point precision to generate double-precision floating point traversal results; a plurality of execution units (EUs) coupled to the ray traversal circuitry, at least one of the plurality of EUs comprising a second plurality of 64-bit ALUs capable of natively performing double-precision floating point operations, the at least one of the plurality of EUs to execute one or more intersection shaders to perform ray-primitive intersection testing at double-precision floating point precision based on the double-precision floating point traversal results.