ALEXANDRIA, Va., Nov. 11 -- United States Patent no. 12,469,203, issued on Nov. 11, was assigned to NVIDIA Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.).
"Efficiency of ray-box tests" was invented by Gregory Muthler (Chapel Hill, N.C.), John Burgess (Austin, Texas), Eric Enderton (Berkeley, Calif.), Nikhil Dixit (Austin, Texas) and Josh Noel (San Jose, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "To improve the efficiency of bounding volumes in a hardware based ray tracer, we employ a sheared axis-aligned bounding box to approximate an oriented bounding box typically defined by rotations. To achieve this, the bounding volume hierarchy builder shears an axis-aligned box to fit tightly around its enclosed oriented geom...