ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,579,730, issued on March 17, was assigned to Apple Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.).
"Ray-box intersection circuitry" was invented by Christopher A. Burns (Austin, Texas) and Casper R. van Benthem (Abbots Langley, Great Britain).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Techniques are disclosed relating to ray intersection tests for ray tracing in graphics processors. In some embodiments, a ray cache stores, transformed ray direction corresponding to a transform of a ray based on its dominant direction axis. Ray intersect acceleration circuitry may determine whether a ray intersects a bounding volume of a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) data structure. Ray...