US Patent 8411088 Accelerated ray tracing

Methods, systems and computer program code (software) products executable in a computer processor element include computing, in the processor element, a minimal axis-aligned bounding box of the intersection of a given axis-aligned bounding box and a triangle under linear motion, and/or traversing, in the processor element, a ray tracing acceleration hierarchy for a given set of rays, wherein the traversing includes computing decisions for a representative form of the rays, without requiring a traversing of all rays in turn.