Wide BVH Traversal with a Short Stack

Abstract

Compressed wide bounding volume hierarchies can significantly improve the performance of incoherent ray traversal, through a smaller working set of inner nodes and therefore a higher cache hit rate. While inner nodes in the hierarchy can be compressed, the size of the working set for a full traversal stack remains a significant overhead. In this paper we introduce an algorithm for wide bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) traversal that uses a short stack of just a few entries. This stack can be fully stored in scarce on-chip memory, which is especially important for GPUs and dedicated ray tracing hardware implementations. Our approach in particular generalizes the restart trail algorithm for binary BVHs to BVHs of arbitrary widths. Applying our algorithm to wide BVHs, we demonstrate that the number of traversal steps with just five stack entries is close to that of a full traversal stack. We also propose an extension to efficiently cull leaf nodes when a closer intersection has been found, which reduces ray primitive intersections by up to 14%.