Intel Corporation
Apparatus and method for implementing bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) operations on tesselation hardware

Abstract:

An apparatus and method are described for using tessellation hardware to generate bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) and perform other ray tracing operations. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: a shader to output a plurality of tessellation factors and one or more input surfaces; and a tessellation circuit comprising first circuitry and/or logic to tesselate each input surface to generate a new set of primitives and second circuitry and/or logic to concurrently generate a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) 1521 based on the new set of primitives.