The Split Grid - A Hierarchical 1D-Grid-based Acceleration Data Structure for Ray Tracing

Abstract

Efficiency of acceleration structures for ray tracing is defined by fast traversal performance, low construction time and small memory footprint. Current state-of-the-art approaches such as kdtrees or Bounding Volume Hierarchies (BVHs) rely on computational expensive construction heuristics (e.g. the Surface Area Heuristic) for fast traversal performance. Grid-based structures are faster to build but consume large amounts of memory or do not adapt well to the underlying scene geometry. Combining concepts of hierarchical grids, kd-trees and BVHs, our approach is based on the idea of nesting 1D-grids and utilizes the merits of the underlying approaches.