Unified rasterization and ray tracing rendering environments

摘要

A graphics processor architecture provides for scan conversion and ray tracing approaches to visible surface determination as concurrent and separate processes. Surfaces can be identified for shading by scan conversion and ray tracing. Data produced by each can be normalized, so that instances of shaders, being executed on a unified shading computation resource, can shade surfaces originating from both ray tracing and rasterization. Such resource also may execute geometry shaders. The shaders can emit rays to be tested for intersection by the ray tracing process. Such shaders can complete, without waiting for those emitted rays to complete. Where scan conversion operates on tiles of 2-D screen pixels, the ray tracing can be tile aware, and controlled to prioritize testing of rays based on scan conversion status. Ray population can be controlled by feedback to any of scan conversion, and shading.

主权项

1. A machine-implemented method of rendering,images in a computer graphics system, comprising:
identifying one or more visible surfaces, from among surfaces in a 3-D scene, the identified on or more visible surfaces comprising visible surfaces for a plurality of pixels located in 2-D screen space; preparing, concurrently with the identifying, to execute shaders associated with respective visible surfaces of pixels of the one or more visible surfaces that have been identified, the preparing comprising completing a respective normalized set of inputs to be provided to each shader for use during execution, the normalized set of inputs comprising a specified set of attributes regardless of whether the one or more identified surfaces were identified by ray intersection testing or scan conversion; executing each of the shaders in a computation cluster, wherein each of the executing shaders comprises one or more operations, wherein at least on of the executing shaders comprises defining one or more rays to be tested for intersection with surfaces in the 3-D scene; testing at least some of the rays for intersection concurrently with the identifying and the executing of the shaders; and shading identified intersections for rays completing intersection testing within the computation cluster.