DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Drawings
Drawings submitted on 1/30/2024 has been accepted by Examiner.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claim 20 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. The claim(s) does/do not fall within at least one of the four categories of patent eligible subject matter because, claim 20 seeks protection for “computer-readable medium”, which might potentially include carrier wave and/or transitory propagating signal under broadest reasonable interpretation. Transitory signals are not considered an invention protected under four statutory categories under 35 USC § 101 (see MPEP §2106). Therefore, claim 20 is rejected.
However, a claim drawn to such a computer-readable medium that covers both transitory and non-transitory embodiments may be amended to narrow the claim to cover only statutory embodiments to avoid a rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 101 by adding the limitation "non-transitory" to the claim. Such an amendment would typically not raise the issue of new matter, even when the specification is silent because the broadest reasonable interpretation relies on the ordinary and customary meaning that includes signals per se. The limited situations in which such an amendment could raise issues of new matter occur, for example, when the specification does not support a non-transitory embodiment because a signal per se is the only viable embodiment such that the amended claim is impermissibly broadened beyond the supporting disclosure. See, e.g., Gentry Gallery, Inc. v. Berkline Corp., 134 F.3d 1473 (Fed. Cir. 1998).
Prior and Pertinent Arts
The prior and/or pertinent art(s) made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure, are:
Du et al. (US 20230377240 A1),
SHKURKO et al. (US 20230206543 A1),
Ogawa et al. (US 11093224 B2),
Mahadevan et al. (US 5797013 A)
who disclose different loop unrolling methods of interest.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-20 allowed over prior art.
The following is an examiner’s statement of reasons for allowance:
Regarding claim 1, prior arts of record taken alone or in combination fails to reasonably disclose or suggest,
obtain, during a compile time, at least one of (1) a number of loops associated with a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) traversal based on a number of ray triangle intersections and a number of ray box intersections or (2) a set of features associated with the BVH traversal and code generation associated with a shader; determine, during the compile time, a loop unroll factor based on at least one of the obtained number of loops or the obtained set of features; adjust, during the compile time, a number of iterations of a loop associated with the BVH traversal based on the loop unroll factor; and output an indication of the adjusted number of iterations.
Method claim 18 and CRM claim 20 also recite allowable feature(s) like claim 1 and thus allowable for same/similar reason(s) stated above.
Any comments considered necessary by applicant must be submitted no later than the payment of the issue fee and, to avoid processing delays, should preferably accompany the issue fee. Such submissions should be clearly labeled “Comments on Statement of Reasons for Allowance.”
Conclusion
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/NURUN FLORA/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2614