ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 31 -- United States Patent no. 12,511,817, issued on Dec. 30, was assigned to NVIDIA Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.).
"Techniques for traversing data employed in ray tracing" was invented by Gregory Muthler (Austin, Texas) and John Burgess (Austin, Texas).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Ray tracing hardware accelerators supporting multiple specifiers for controlling the traversal of a ray tracing acceleration data structure are disclosed. For example, traversal efficiency and complex ray tracing effects can be achieved by specifying traversals through such data structures using both programmable ray operations and explicit node masking. The explicit node masking utilizes dedic...