US Patent 8237711 Tracing of shader-generated ray groups using coupled intersection testing

For ray tracing scenes composed of primitives, systems and methods accelerate ray/primitive intersection identification by testing rays against elements of geometry acceleration data (GAD) in a parallelized intersection testing resource. Groups of rays can be described as shared attribute information and individual ray data for efficient ray data transfer between a host processor and the testing resource. The host processor also hosts shading and/or management processes controlling the testing resource and adapting the ray tracing, as necessary or desirable, to meet criteria, while reducing degradation of rendering quality. The GAD elements can be arranged in a graph, and rays can be collected into collections based on whether a ray intersects a given element. When a collection is deemed ready for further testing, it is tested for intersection with GAD elements connected, in the graph, to the given element. The graph can be hierarchical such that rays of a given collection are tested against children of the GAD element associated with the given collection.