HARDWARE ACCELERATION FOR RAY TRACING PRIMITIVES THAT SHARE VERTICES

The invention discloses hardware acceleration for ray tracing primitives that share vertices. Enhanced techniques applicable to a ray tracing hardware accelerator for traversing a hierarchical acceleration structure and its underlying primitives are disclosed. For example, traversal speed is improved by grouping processing of primitives sharing at least one feature (e.g., a vertex or an edge) during ray-primitive intersection testing. Grouping the primitives for ray intersection testing can reduce processing (e.g., projections and transformations of primitive vertices and/or determining edge function values) because at least a portion of the processing results related to the shared feature in one primitive can be used in determine whether the ray intersects another primitive(s). Processing triangles sharing an edge can double the culling rate of the triangles in the ray/triangle intersection test without replicating the hardware. 本发明公开了共享顶点的射线追踪图元的硬件加速，公开了适用于射线追踪硬件加速器的增强技术，用于遍历分层加速结构及其基础图元。例如，通过在射线图元相交测试期间对共享