Measuring acceleration structures

Hardware accelerated raytracing, as supported by DirectX 12 and Vulkan, relies on an abstract data structure that stores scene geometry, known as “acceleration structure” and often referred to as “BVH” or “BLAS”. Unlike geometry representation for rasterization, rendering engines can not customize the data layout; unlike texture formats, the layout is not standardized across vendors. It may seem like a trivial matter - surely, by 2025 all implementations are close to each other in memory consumption, and the main competition is over ray traversal performance and new ray tracing features? Let’s find out.