83 patents in this list

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Real-time ray tracing demands intensive computational resources, with complex scenes requiring millions of ray-surface intersection calculations per frame. Current implementations face challenges in managing memory bandwidth, dealing with incoherent rays, and handling complex material interactions while maintaining frame rates above 60 FPS at 4K resolution.

The fundamental challenge lies in balancing visual fidelity against computational efficiency when simulating physically accurate light behavior in dynamic environments.

This page brings together solutions from recent research—including adaptive importance sampling for dynamic lighting, optimized material graph compilation for parallel processors, hybrid shadow rendering techniques, and efficient caustics generation methods. These and other approaches focus on practical implementations that maximize visual quality while maintaining real-time performance on consumer graphics hardware.

1. Ray Tracing Method with Distance-Based Light Path Optimization for Complex Scenes

HY METACORE, 2024

Ray tracing method for metaverse implementation that reduces computational requirements by setting different paths of light based on distance between objects. The method involves generating a primary ray from the viewpoint, finding the first intersection point, checking the distance to other objects, and deriving the light path and sub-rays accordingly. This allows efficient ray tracing for complex scenes with dynamic objects by optimizing light propagation based on object proximity.

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2. Adaptive Subsampling Method for Reduced Calculation in Real-Time Ray Tracing Reflection Rendering

SHENZHEN TUWEI TECH CO LTD, SHENZHEN TUWEI TECHNOLOGY CO LTD, 2024

Reducing the calculation amount for real-time ray tracing reflection rendering using a technique called adaptive subsampling. The method involves rendering a subset of pixels in the image at a lower resolution, then upscaling and combining the results. This selective low-res rendering reduces the overall calculation burden compared to ray tracing the entire image at full resolution. The key idea is to choose which pixels to render at low res based on a preset algorithm, like random selection or splitting into regions. This adaptive subsampling allows trading off accuracy for computational efficiency.

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3. Ray Tracing Rendering Method with Cached Textures and Separate Denoising

SHENZHEN TUWEI TECH CO LTD, SHENZHEN TUWEI TECHNOLOGY CO LTD, 2024

A ray tracing based rendering method for computer graphics that improves rendering efficiency and quality. The method involves using ray tracing to generate rendering cache textures for each light source in a scene. These textures contain camera, geometry, material, and acceleration structure data. Denoising is applied to the textures. The textures are then merged and sampled to form the final rendered image. This allows reusing cached data for multiple light sources and accelerated ray tracing. The textures can be denoised separately for better quality.

4. Real-Time Ambient Light Occlusion Rendering via Pixel-Based Ray Tracing with Spherical Light Sampling

SHENZHEN TUWEI TECH CO LTD, SHENZHEN TUWEI TECHNOLOGY CO LTD, 2024

Real-time rendering of ambient light occlusion using ray tracing to improve the accuracy and efficiency of ambient lighting effects in real-time 3D rendering. The method involves ray tracing from each pixel to the scene geometry to find intersections, then sampling ambient light from spheres centered on those points to calculate occlusion. This provides realistic occlusion for moving objects and prevents issues like shadow artifacts.

5. Ray Tracing Acceleration via Byte Code Compiled Material Graphs for Parallel Processors

NVIDIA Corporation, 2023

Accelerating ray tracing and material shading on parallel processors like GPUs without adding transistors. The method involves compiling material graphs into optimized byte code instructions for execution on the parallel processing cores. The material graphs represent the surface properties and relationships of objects. The byte code is generated by parsing the graphs into expression trees and optimizing them. This allows efficient evaluation of the material graphs using the parallel processing cores without branching or sorting rays.

6. Hybrid Shadow Rendering Technique for Foliage Scenes Using Combined Ray-Traced Opaque Geometry and Alpha-Tested Shadow Maps

NVIDIA CORPORATION, 2023

Render shadows in scenes with foliage like trees and bushes using a hybrid approach that improves performance and realism when ray-tracing shadows of alpha-tested geometry. The approach involves combining noisy visibility samples from raytraced opaque geometry with shadow maps that only contain alpha-tested geometry. This results in hybrid denoised shadows that show penumbras of high quality and hard ray-traced shadows at contact points with a low performance impact. The alpha-only shadow map only contains depth values from geometry that passes the alpha-test.

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7. Ray Tracing Method Using Cubic Function Factorization and Voxel Normal Interpolation for Signed Distance Functions

NVIDIA Corporation, 2023

Rendering signed distance functions (SDFs) in computer graphics more efficiently by improving techniques for tracing rays, computing surface normals, and finding ray intersections with SDF surfaces. The techniques involve: 1. Factorizing SDF coefficients into parameters to compute ray intersections with SDF surfaces using a cubic function. 2. Computing surface normals by interpolating neighboring voxel normals. 3. Finding ray intersections with SDF surfaces using turning points of the cubic function to determine shadowed regions. These techniques improve ray tracing and surface computation efficiency compared to duplicative calculations and separate ray tracing for shadows.

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8. Interleaved Texture Structure with Alternating Blocks for Efficient Ray Tracing Cache Utilization

NVIDIA CORPORATION, 2023

Interleaving textures to improve ray tracing performance for scenes with incoherent light rays. Instead of separately allocating and accessing cache lines for each texture associated with an object intersected by a ray, the textures are combined into a single interleaved texture. This reduces the number of cache lines needed and less texture data is read compared to separately accessing each texture. The interleaved texture contains blocks from multiple textures alternating in order. It can be accessed using multiple texture headers with stride distances between blocks from the same texture. This allows fetching from the interleaved texture instead of separate textures for rays with incoherent intersections.

US11823318B2-patent-drawing

9. Ray Tracing Hardware with Selective Programmable Ray Operation Execution for Mixed Level of Detail Acceleration Structures

NVIDIA CORPORATION, 2023

Hardware acceleration of ray tracing for realistic graphics rendering that provides selective execution of programmable ray operations. The technique allows efficient and flexible ray intersection tests by enabling custom ray operations like selecting the level of detail (LOD) of an object. This improves ray tracing performance by allowing optimized ray operations for acceleration structures like BVHs that have mixed LOD models. It avoids the rigidity of requiring all nodes to support the same programmable ray operations. Instead, the ray operations can be applied selectively to nodes based on their data.

10. Parallel Penumbra Detection Using Wave Intrinsic Functions for Shadow Denoising

NVIDIA Corporation, 2023

Detecting penumbra regions for shadow denoising using wave intrinsic functions on parallel processors to avoid expensive post-processing for penumbra detection. The approach leverages threads of schedulable units (e.g., warps) used for visibility sampling during ray tracing to identify penumbra regions. Each thread computes a value indicating if its pixel region is in a penumbra using intrinsic functions. This avoids post-processing and allows selective denoising of penumbra regions vs fully lit/shaded regions. It also determines filter parameters based on sampling statistics to adapt denoising for regions.

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11. Graphics Pipeline with Traversal Coprocessor for Real-Time Ray Tracing Acceleration

NVIDIA CORPORATION, 2023

Hardware acceleration for real-time ray tracing to enable interactive ray tracing for applications like virtual reality and augmented reality. The acceleration is provided by a dedicated co-processor called a traversal coprocessor that sits in the graphics pipeline alongside the streaming processors. The coprocessor efficiently traverses an acceleration data structure like a bounding volume hierarchy to quickly determine ray intersections with scene objects. It handles tasks like ray-bounding volume intersection, ray-primitive intersection, and ray transforms. The coprocessor's dedicated hardware provides faster ray tracing compared to software ray tracing.

12. Ray Tracing Hardware with Configurable Ray Operations and Parallel Processing for Intersection Tests

NVIDIA CORPORATION, 2023

Hardware-accelerated ray tracing that provides flexible and efficient ray intersection tests for real-time graphics. The technique allows combining ray operations like instance masking and geometric level of detail testing in parallel processing units. This improves ray tracing efficiency by enabling more complex ray tracing effects while simultaneously improving ray tracing efficiency. It allows dynamically choosing ray traversal based on multiple selection criteria per ray. The ray operations are configured to occur before and after node stack push/pop in the traversal coprocessor. This enables combining ray operations like instance masking and geometric level of detail testing in parallel processing units.

13. Image Generation System with Hardware-Accelerated Sampling of Large Emissive Textures Using Cumulative Distribution Functions and Geometric Representation

Nvidia Corporation, 2023

Efficiently generating high quality images using techniques that allow efficient sampling of large emissive textures for lighting scenes. The method involves determining cumulative distribution functions for textures, constructing geometric representations from them, and tracing rays against the geometry to sample the textures efficiently. This hardware-accelerated sampling reduces noise compared to naive random sampling. The approach allows realistic lighting of scenes using large textures without incurring excessive computation cost.

14. Irradiance Cache-Based Ray Interaction Sharing System for Enhanced Ray Tracing Efficiency

NVIDIA Corporation, 2023

Techniques for sharing irradiance between ray interactions spatially and temporally to improve ray tracing performance for rendering virtual scenes. The method involves using irradiance caches to aggregate and interpolate irradiance samples instead of sampling from every location. Irradiance caches are associated with locations and updated by casting fewer rays based on ranking factors. Irradiance from other caches can be blended to compute irradiance at a location. This reduces the number of samples needed for lighting calculations compared to full ray tracing.

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15. Fast-Full History Clamping Technique for Temporal Lag Reduction in Real-Time Ray Tracing

Nvidia Corporation, 2023

Reducing temporal lag in real-time ray tracing and other dynamic scenes without compromising image quality. It uses a fast history buffer with higher blend weight and clamping to determine a clamping window for the full history buffer. This allows controlling the balance between noise reduction and temporal lag. The fast history buffer is used to clamp the full history value before reprojection to the current frame. The full history is still maintained for accurate smoothing in static scenes without clamping. This fast-full history clamping technique reduces temporal lag in dynamic scenes without adding computational complexity compared to conventional methods.

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16. 3D Scene Light Calculation Using Dynamic Mask-Based Importance Sampling for Ray Tracing

Nvidia Corporation, 2023

Efficiently calculating light in 3D scenes with complex environments like indoor scenes using importance sampling. The technique involves generating a mask that identifies regions in the scene where lighting can affect pixels. This mask is continuously updated per frame. It's used to extract an importance sampling function for tracing rays to find light paths from the environment. This improves ray guidance to efficiently find important light transport paths. The mask considers occlusions and identifies areas where rays can hit lights in the environment map.

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17. Ray Cone Tracing with Differential Barycentric Curvature Computation for Mipmap Sampling

NVIDIA Corporation, 2023

Ray cone tracing for more efficient and realistic rendering of images using ray cone tracing. The technique avoids a separate G-buffer pass for determining surface curvature during ray cone tracing. Instead, when a ray cone hits a surface, it computes the curvature using differential barycentric coordinates at the hit point. This curvature is then used to determine the width of the ray cone at the next intersection. This width is used to sample mipmaps during texture filtering operations.

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18. Neural Network-Based Real-Time Radiance Caching for Path Tracing with Fully-Fused Execution

NVIDIA Corporation, 2023

Real-time neural network radiance caching for path tracing in 3D rendering applications like computer graphics. The technique uses a neural network to estimate scattered radiance components of global illumination. Short paths are traced from a camera through pixels in an image. The neural network caches radiance predictions at vertices. Longer paths are extended from the rendering paths to train the network. This allows real-time caching without pre-training. Fully-fused neural network execution improves performance by partitioning inputs and loading weights into registers once for parallel processing.

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19. Parallel Ray Tracing System with Core-Assigned Ray Material Shading and Fixed-Function Pipeline Execution

NVIDIA Corporation, 2023

Parallel ray tracing technique for accelerated graphics processing using a physically-based rendering engine. The technique involves assigning each ray to a separate processing core and executing the ray's material shading instructions in parallel. This allows the ray's intersection point and material properties to be evaluated concurrently. The cores can also perform specialized fixed-function pipelines for tasks like importance sampling. The cores return secondary ray directions when intersecting surfaces. This enables efficient ray tracing using a parallel architecture by leveraging the cores' SIMD/SIMT execution models.

20. Hybrid Rendering Method with Combined Rasterization and Ray Tracing Utilizing Hardware Acceleration

Jiangsu University of Technology, JIANGSU UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, 2023

Ray tracing rendering method that combines rasterization and ray tracing for efficient real-time rendering using hardware acceleration. It leverages the rasterization pipeline to quickly project elements onto a plane and obtain depth values. These depths are used to accelerate ray tracing calculations by converting them to distances to the nearest collision points in 3D. This allows utilizing ray tracing for effects like shadows and reflections while leveraging rasterization for initial projection.

21. Graphics Pipeline with Traversal Coprocessor for Accelerated Ray Tracing Operations

22. Ray Cone Tracing System Utilizing Anisotropic Texture Filtering with Cylinder-Based Intersection Approximation

23. Multi-Box Bounding Volume Hierarchy with Wide Compressed Treelet Encoding for Ray Tracing Hardware Acceleration

24. Real-Time Ray Tracing with Inter-Frame Photon Feedback for Adaptive Anisotropic Caustics

25. Graphics Processing Unit with Dedicated Coprocessor for Ray Tracing Acceleration Using Bounding Volume Hierarchies

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