Hash-Based Ray Path Prediction: Skipping BVH Traversal Computation by Exploiting Ray Locality

Abstract

State-of-the-art ray tracing techniques operate on hierarchical acceleration structures such as BVH trees which wrap objects in a scene into bounding volumes of decreasing sizes. Acceleration structures reduce the amount of ray-scene intersections that a ray has to perform to find the intersecting object. However, we observe a large amount of redundancy when rays are traversing these acceleration structures. While modern acceleration structures explore the spatial organization of the scene, they neglect similarities between rays that traverse the structures and thereby cause redundant traversals. This paper provides a limit study of a new promising technique, Hash-Based Ray Path Prediction (HRPP), which exploits the similarity between rays to predict leaf nodes to avoid redundant acceleration structure traversals. Our data shows that acceleration structure traversal consumes a significant proportion of the ray tracing rendering time regardless of the platform or the target image quality. Our study quantifies unused ray locality and evaluates the theoretical potential for improved ray traversal performance for both coherent and seemingly incoherent rays. We show that HRPP is able to skip, on average, 40% of all hit-all traversal computations.