METHOD, APPARATUS, AND COMPUTER READABLE MEDIUM FOR ACCELERATING INTERSECTION TESTING IN RAY-TRACING RENDERING

For ray tracing scenes composed of primitives, systems and methods accelerate intersection testing by testing rays against elements of geometry acceleration data (GAD) arranged in a graph of nodes, where pairs of nodes are connected by edges, and each element bounds a varying granularity selection of the primitives. Upon detection of intersections between rays and elements, references to the rays are added to respective collections associated with the elements. Further processing of those rays is deferred until rays of a given collection are determined ready, and then rays from such a ready collection are tested for intersection with elements of GAD connected by edges to the element associated with the ready collection. When a primitive is bounded by no higher granularity GAD element, it is tested for intersection, and indications of intersection are output. Some examples encourage production of many secondary rays and collect such rays for parallelized testing, regardless of traversal order, camera ray association, or a time when each ray was spawned.