Stackless Multi-BVH Traversal for CPU, MIC and GPU Ray Tracing

Stackless traversal algorithms for ray tracing acceleration structures require significantly less storage per ray than ordinary stack-based ones. This advantage is important for massively parallel rendering methods, where there are many rays in flight. On SIMD architectures, a commonly used acceleration structure is the multi bounding volume hierarchy (MBVH), which has multiple bounding boxes per node for improved parallelism. It scales to branching factors higher than two, for which, however, only stack-based traversal methods have been proposed so far. In this paper, we introduce a novel stackless traversal algorithm for MBVHs with up to 4-way branching. Our approach replaces the stack with a small bitmask, supports dynamic ordered traversal, and has a low computation overhead. We also present efficient implementation techniques for recent CPU, MIC (Intel Xeon Phi), and GPU (NVIDIA Kepler) architectures.