Ray-Box Culling for Tree Structures

Ray-primitive intersection tests are the most important operations in ray tracing. The ray-box culling algorithm was presented to accelerate these intersection tests on grid structures, but this algorithm has not been widely used due to the poor ray traversal performance of the grid structures themselves. In this paper, we demonstrate how to apply this algorithm to tree structures and investigate its efficiency in terms of tree construction time and ray traversal performance. Experimental results show that our approach achieves up to 1.15× faster ray tracing performance and up to 1.22× faster total rendering performance, including tree construction and ray tracing.