Constructing K-d Tree on GPU through Treelet Restructuring

With every new generation of graphics processing units (GPUs), offloading ray-tracing algorithms to GPUs becomes more feasible. Software-hardware solutions for ray-tracing focus on implementing its basic components, such as building and traversing bounding volume hierarchies (BVH). However, global illumination algorithms, such as photon mapping method, depend on another kind of acceleration structure, namely k-d trees. In this work, we adapt state-ofthe-art GPU-based BVH-building algorithm of treelet restructuring to k-d trees. By evaluating the performance of the resulting k-d tree, we show that treelet optimisation heuristic suitable for BVHs of triangles is inadequate for k-d trees of points.