Axis-Normalized Ray-Box Intersection

Ray-axis aligned bounding box intersection tests play a crucial role in the runtime performance of many rendering applications, driven not by complexity but mainly by the volume of tests required. While existing solutions were believed to be pretty much optimal in terms of runtime on current hardware, our paper introduces a new intersection test requiring fewer arithmetic operations compared to all previous methods. By transforming the ray we eliminate the need for one third of the traditional bounding-slab tests and achieve a speed enhancement of approximately 13.8% or 10.9%, depending on the compiler. We present detailed runtime analyses in various scenarios.