Compressed-leaf bounding volume hierarchies

Abstract

We propose and evaluate what we call Compressed-Leaf Bounding Volume Hierarchies (CLBVH), which strike a balance between compressed and non-compressed BVH layouts. Our CLBVH layout introduces dedicated compressed multi-leaf nodes where most effective at reducing memory use, and uses regular BVH nodes for inner nodes and small, isolated leaves. We show that when implemented within the Embree ray tracing framework, this approach achieves roughly the same memory savings as Embree's compressed BVH layout, while maintaining almost the full performance of its fastest non-compressed BVH.