Bauszat, PabloKastner, Marc AurelEisemann, MartinMagnor, MarcusMathias Paulin and Carsten Dachsbacher2014-12-162014-12-1620141017-4656https://doi.org/10.2312/egp.20141067We present a new acceleration structure for ray tracing called the Split Grid. Combining concepts of hierarchical grids, kd-trees and Bounding Volume Hierarchies (BVHs), our approach is based on the idea of nesting 1D-grids. Our proposed acceleration structure is compact in storage, adaptive to the scene geometry and can be traversed using a fast and efficient traversal scheme. We show that the Split Grid is comparable to other current state-of-theart acceleration structures regarding traversal performance and memory footprint. While other data structures usually achieve these levels of performance only due to a complex and expensive construction process (e.g. using the Surface Area Heuristic (SAH) [MB90]), our proposed Split Grid is built with a very simplistic construction scheme which is a major benefit of our approach.I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]Methodology and TechniquesGraphics data structures and data typesI.3.7 [Computer Graphics]Three Dimensional Graphics and RealismRaytracing