ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,333,642, issued on June 17, was assigned to NVIDIA Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.).
"Performance of ray-traced shadow creation within a scene" was invented by Jon Story (Grafrath, Germany) and Holger Heinrich Gruen (Bavaria, Germany).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A ray (e.g., a traced path of light, etc.) is generated from an originating pixel within a scene being rendered. Additionally, one or more shadow map lookups are performed for the originating pixel to estimate an intersection of the ray with alpha-tested geometry within the scene. A shadow map stores the distance of geometry as seen from the point of view of the light, and alpha-tes...