Node Culling Multi-Hit BVH Traversal

Abstract

We introduce node culling multi-hit BVH traversal to enable faster multi-hit ray tracing in a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH). Existing, widely used ray tracing engines expose API features that enable implementation of multi-hit traversal without modifying their underlying---and highly optimized---BVH construction and traversal routines; however, this approach requires naive multi-hit traversal to guarantee correctness. We evaluate two low-overhead, minimally invasive, and flexible API mechanisms that enable node culling implementation entirely with user-level code, thereby leveraging existing BVH construction and traversal routines. Results show that node culling offers potentially significant improvement in multi-hit performance in a BVH for cases in which users request fewer-than-all hits.