Breadth-first ray tracing utilizing uniform spatial subdivision

Breadth-first ray tracing is based on the idea of exchanging the roles of rays and objects. For scenes with a large number of objects, it may be profitable to form a set of rays and compare each object in turn against this set. By doing so, thrashing, due to disk access, can be minimized. We present ways to combine breadth-first methods with traditional efficient algorithms, along with new schemes to minimize accessing objects stored on disk. Experimental analysis, including comparisons with depth-first ray tracing, shows that large databases can be handled efficiently with this approach.