COMPACTING RESULTS VECTORS BETWEEN STAGES OF GRAPHICS PROCESSING

摘要

Ray tracing, and more generally, graphics operations taking place in a 3-D scene, involve a plurality of constituent graphics operations. Responsibility for executing these operations can be distributed among different sets of computation units. The sets of computation units each can execute a set of instructions on a parallelized set of input data elements and produce results. These results can be that the data elements can be categorized into different subsets, where each subset requires different processing as a next step. The data elements of these different subsets can be coalesced so that they are contiguous in a results set. The results set can be used to schedule additional computation, and if there are empty locations of a scheduling vector (after accounting for the members of a given subset), then those empty locations can be filled with other data elements that require the same further processing as that subset.

主权项

1. A method of concurrently performing graphics computations, comprising:
determining a set of rays to be processed concurrently by a plurality of computation units according to a determined common program of instructions; producing a data structure that comprises ordered data for each ray of the set of rays; providing the data structure to the plurality of computation units; performing the program of instructions on the set of rays, by the plurality of computation units, to produce results for the set of rays, wherein the results comprise that a first subset of the rays of the set are to be processed concurrently using a further common program of instructions, but remaining rays of the set do not require such processing; and coalescing data for the rays of the first subset into contiguous locations of a data structure, before initiating processing of the first subset of rays.