Reduction of BVH-Node Bandwidth with Incremental Traversal

Abstract

Incremental encoding of Bounding Volume Hierarchies (BVH) enables coarse quantization of bounding volumes, significantly reducing their memory footprint. However, reducing the size of the BVH alone does not yield a comparable reduction in memory bandwidth in some embodiments. While the bounding volumes of the BVH nodes can be aggressively quantized, the size of the child node pointers remains a significant overhead. A two-level clustering method introduces a memory layout and node addressing scheme, which allows the reordering of BVH nodes to reduce their memory footprint in hardware ray tracing systems using reduced precision ray traversal.

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