US Patent Issued to NVIDIA on July 8 for "Method for forward progress and programmable timeouts of tree traversal mechanisms in hardware" (California, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,354,212, issued on July 8, was assigned to NVIDIA Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Method for forward progress and programmable timeouts of tree traversal mechanisms in hardware" was invented by Greg Muthler (Chapel Hill, N.C.), Ronald Charles Babich Jr. (Murrysville, Pa.), William Parsons Newhall Jr. (Woodside, Calif.), Peter Nelson (San Francisco), James Robertson (Austin, Texas) and John Burgess (Austin, Texas).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In a ray tracer, to prevent any long-running query from hanging the graphics processing unit, a traversal coprocessor provides a preemption mechanism that will allow rays to stop processing or time out...