Abstract: Apparatus and method for camera-aware BVH re-braiding. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: ray tracing acceleration hardware to be used to determine ray traversal results when traversing a ray through a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH); and BVH processing hardware logic to modify the BVH to reduce spatial overlap between one or more BVH subtrees based on a detected camera position to produce a modified BVH.

Abstract: Apparatus and method for environmental probe guided light sampling. For example, one embodiment of a method comprises: generating a plurality of environment probes for a graphics scene, each environment probe having a direction originally associated therewith for capturing light from one or more light sources associated with the graphics scene; and altering one or more directions associated with a corresponding one or more environment probes to allow the one or more environment probes to receive a higher radiance of light from the one or more light sources compared to light received with the one or more directions originally associated with the one or more environment probes.

Abstract: In a computer graphics apparatus, a three-dimensional object is modelled using a mesh of triangles which approximate the object surface. To display images, each triangle is sub-divided into smaller triangles, which do not necessarily lie in the same plane as the original triangle. In this way, the curvature of the object surface can be more accurately modelled. A parametric patch, such as a Bernstein-Bezier triangular patch or Heron patch, is used to determine how to divide each triangle into smaller non-planar triangles. In addition, the number of non-planar triangles is determined using the size of the original triangle in the current or a preceding frame of image data. The non-planar triangles are stored for use in subsequent frames which require the same number of non-planar triangles, thereby reducing processing requirements.