Nvidia corporation (20240095996). EFFICIENCY OF RAY-BOX TESTS simplified abstract

EFFICIENCY OF RAY-BOX TESTS

Organization Name

nvidia corporation

Inventor(s)

Gregory Muthler of Chapel Hill NC (US)

John Burgess of Austin TX (US)

Eric Enderton of Berkeley CA (US)

Nikhil Dixit of Austin TX (US)

Josh Noel of San Jose CA (US)

EFFICIENCY OF RAY-BOX TESTS - A simplified explanation of the abstract

This abstract first appeared for US patent application 20240095996 titled 'EFFICIENCY OF RAY-BOX TESTS

Simplified Explanation

The efficiency of bounding volumes in a hardware-based ray tracer is improved by employing a sheared axis-aligned bounding box to approximate an oriented bounding box typically defined by rotations. This involves shearing an axis-aligned box to tightly fit around its enclosed oriented geometry, computing the inverse shear transform, storing the bounds as axis-aligned boxes in memory defined in the new sheared coordinate system, and transforming a ray into the sheared coordinate system before testing intersection with the boxes.

• Sheared axis-aligned bounding box used to approximate oriented bounding box
• Inverse shear transform computed to store bounds in new sheared coordinate system
• Ray transformed into sheared coordinate system for intersection testing
• Efficiencies gained through constraints on shear dimensions and transform coefficients, sharing shear transform, and specialized shear transform calculator/accelerator in hardware

Potential Applications

The technology can be applied in various fields such as computer graphics, virtual reality, augmented reality, and gaming for efficient ray tracing operations.

Problems Solved

1. Improved efficiency in bounding volume calculations in hardware-based ray tracing. 2. Accurate approximation of oriented bounding boxes using sheared axis-aligned bounding boxes.

Benefits

1. Faster ray tracing performance. 2. Reduced memory usage for storing bounding volumes. 3. Enhanced accuracy in intersection testing.

Potential Commercial Applications

The technology can be utilized in developing advanced graphics processing units (GPUs), virtual reality headsets, gaming consoles, and software applications for real-time rendering and simulation.

Possible Prior Art

One possible prior art could be the use of bounding volume hierarchies in ray tracing algorithms to optimize intersection tests between rays and geometry. However, the specific approach of employing sheared axis-aligned bounding boxes to approximate oriented bounding boxes may be a novel innovation.

How does the sheared axis-aligned bounding box approach compare to other methods of approximating oriented bounding boxes in terms of efficiency and accuracy?

The article does not provide a direct comparison with other methods of approximating oriented bounding boxes. Further research or experimentation may be needed to evaluate the performance of the sheared axis-aligned bounding box approach against alternative techniques.

What are the potential limitations or drawbacks of implementing a sheared axis-aligned bounding box system in hardware-based ray tracing?

The article does not discuss any potential limitations or drawbacks of the proposed technology. It would be essential to investigate factors such as computational overhead, memory requirements, and compatibility with existing ray tracing systems to assess the feasibility and practicality of integrating sheared axis-aligned bounding boxes into hardware accelerators.

Original Abstract Submitted

to improve the efficiency of bounding volumes in a hardware based ray tracer, we employ a sheared axis-aligned bounding box to approximate an oriented bounding box typically defined by rotations. to achieve this, the bounding volume hierarchy builder shears an axis-aligned box to fit tightly around its enclosed oriented geometry in top level or bottom level space, then computes the inverse shear transform. the bounds are still stored as axis-aligned boxes in memory, now defined in the new sheared coordinate system, along with the derived parameters to transform a ray into the sheared coordinate system before testing intersection with the boxes. the ray-bounding volume intersection test is performed as usual, just in the new sheared coordinate system. additional efficiencies are gained by constraining the number of shear dimensions, constraining the shear transform coefficients to a quantized list, sharing a shear transform across a collection of bounds, performing a shear transform only for ray-bounds testing and not for ray-geometry intersection testing, and adding a specialized shear transform calculator/accelerator to the hardware.