US Patent Issued to Apple on Jan. 13 for "Primitive testing for ray intersection at multiple precisions" (British, American Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Jan. 13 -- United States Patent no. 12,524,862, issued on Jan. 13, was assigned to Apple Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.).

"Primitive testing for ray intersection at multiple precisions" was invented by Christopher A Burns (Austin, Texas) and Casper R. W. van Benthem (Abbots Langley, Great Britain).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Techniques are disclosed relating to testing whether a ray intersects a graphics primitive, e.g., for ray tracing. In some embodiments, intersection circuitry performs a reduced-precision conservative intersection test and shader circuitry performs an original-precision intersection test if the intersection circuitry indicates a hit. The intersection circuitry...