Recently, ray tracing on consumer level graphics hardware has been introduced. So far, most published studies on this topic use the uniform grid spatial subdivision structure for reducing the number of ray/triangle intersection tests. For many types of scenes, a hierarchical acceleration structure is more appropriate. This thesis by Lars Ole Simonsen and Niels Thrane of University of Aarhus compares GPU based traversal of kd-trees and uniform grids with a novel bounding volume hierarchy traversal scheme. The three implementations are compared in terms of performance and usefulness on the GPU. The thesis concludes that on the GPU, the bounding volume hierarchy traversal technique is up to 9 times faster than its implementations of uniform grid and kd-tree. Additionally, this technique proves the simplest to implement and the most memory efficient. (Lars Ole’s Website or Direct link to thesis PDF.)