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[Grace Ramirez]

Good topic. The biggest bang-for-buck optimization here is reducing node overlap in your BVH, not just minimizing node count. A node with high child overlap forces the tracer to descend into both subtrees far more often, which is where most traversal cycles get burned on leaf-heavy trees. I’d prioritize SAH-based splitting with a decent leaf size target (usually 4–8 triangles) and then explicitly measure overlap after building—if your interior nodes average significant overlap, consider a post-build smoothing pass or a hybrid SAH/median split. Also worth implementing child sorting at traversal time by descending child first; reordering the two children so the nearer one is tested and pushed last keeps your traversal stack shallow and improves cache locality on the node array.

On the hardware side, the traversal budget matters enormously—NVIDIA’s RT cores (and AMD’s ray-tracing units) execute the ray/AABB overlap test plus stack push/pop as fixed hardware ops, so the cost is dominated by stack depth and random-access node fetches rather than arithmetic. Keep your stack depth bounded (a fixed

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