Patent US 11,367,243

An apparatus and method for performing BVH compression and decompression concurrently with stores and loads, respectively. For example, one embodiment comprises: bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) construction circuitry to build a BVH based on a set of input primitives, the BVH comprising a plurality of uncompressed coordinates; traversal/intersection circuitry to traverse one or more rays through the BVH and determine intersections with the set of input primitives using the uncompressed coordinates; store with compression circuitry to compress the BVH including the plurality of uncompressed coordinates to generate a compressed BVH with compressed coordinates and to store the compressed BVH to a memory subsystem; and load with decompression circuitry to decompress the BVH including the compressed coordinates to generate a decompressed BVH with the uncompressed coordinates and to load the decompressed BVH with uncompressed coordinates to a cache and/or a set of registers accessible by the traversal/intersection circuitry.