ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 24 -- United States Patent no. 12,586,146, issued on March 24, was assigned to Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).
"Progressive material caching" was invented by Takahiro Harada (Santa Clara, Calif.) and Shin Fujieda (Tokyo).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "With minimal preprocessing of trees of materials in textures, this approach progressively caches outputs of some material nodes that are evaluated while rendering a scene. A node may be the root of a subtree, and the node may generate a value of a texel based on values of other nodes in the subtree. The subtree of a cacheable node contains no shading-point dependent node as a descendant other than texture...