I've been looking to play with ray tracing, starting with a simplest of minecraft clones (making something more akin to cave game, for starter).
I figured I'd define a voxel as a primitive and then use the regular voxel grid to trace the rays. I don't need to test (look) for intersections here, I can precisely calculate them, tracing the ray voxel by voxel.
However, I do have an RTX card which does accelerate ray tracing with dedicated hardware, and I may be able to get faster results if I were to leverage it.
From what I gathered, one of the components of the RTX system (or any ray tracer, really) is an acceleration structure that speeds up the process of testing for intersections.
You give the card an octree or a BVH (or something similar) and it uses it to quickly find the closest hit (or any other hits, for that matter).
If I'm not mistaken, the hardware accelerated part here is the hit test. It's power is in the ability to test many primitives against one or more rays in a very short amount of time.
Given the method I'm using for ray tracing, that is the one part that I don't really need, since I don't need to search for which primitives the ray intersects (I calculate them explicitly), I just need to check where the intersection on them is.
Am I wrong? Can the architecture be used to accelerate what I'm doing? If so, is it due to the fact that I misunderstood how it works, or can I adapt my plan in order to make it more friendly to the architecture, making the resulting plan faster than the original?