Microsoft's research division has been hard at work trying to make ray tracing a more accessible feature for games of the future. A new patent from one of the team's senior architects describes how the memory and cache load for bounding volume hierarchies (BVH)— structures used to speed up ray tracing—can be reduced by using a similar approach to texture Level of Detail (LOD) application.
While Microsoft's Xbox consoles would be the main beneficiary of this technique, AMD's traditionally ray tracing weak GPUs, and graphics cards that aren't blessed with a ton of VRAM are also a potential winners.
