Construction of bounding volume hierarchies with SAH cost approximation on temporary subtrees

Abstract Advances in research on quality metrics for bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) have shown that greedy top-down SAH builders construct BVHs with superior traversal performance despite the fact that the resulting SAH values are higher than those created by more sophisticated builders. Motivated by this observation we examine three construction algorithms that use recursive SAH values of temporarily constructed SAH-built BVHs to guide the construction and perform an extensive evaluation. The resulting BVHs achieve up to 37% better trace performance for primary rays and up to 32% better trace performance for secondary diffuse rays compared to standard plane sweeping without applying spatial splits. Allowing spatial splits still achieves up to 18% resp. 15% better performance. While our approach is not suitable for real-time BVH construction, we show that the proposed algorithm has subquadratic computational complexity in the number of primitives, which renders it usable in practical applications. Additionally, we describe an approach for improving the forecasting abilities of the SAH-EPO ray tracing performance predictor which also increases its relevance for primary rays.