Ray-Strips: A Compact Mesh Representation for Interactive Ray Tracing

We present a novel hierarchical representation, ray-strips, for interactive ray tracing of complex triangle meshes. Prior optimized algorithms for ray tracing explicitly store each triangle in the input model. Instead, a ray-strip takes advantage of mesh connectivity for compact storage, efficient traversal and ray intersections. As a result, we considerably reduce the memory overhead of the original model and the hierarchical representation. We also present efficient algorithms for single ray and ray packet traversal using ray-strips. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our representation can utilize the SIMD capabilities of current CPUs for incoherent ray packets and single rays. We show the benefit of ray-strips on models with tens of thousands to tens of millions of triangles. In practice, our approach can reduce the storage overhead of interactive ray tracing algorithms by up to five times compared to standard approaches. Moreover, we improve the runtime performance of ray tracing on large models.