APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR ACCELERATING BVH BUILDS BY MERGING BOUNDING BOXES

Apparatus and method for accelerating bounding box merge operations. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: ray tracing acceleration hardware to be used to determine ray traversal results when traversing a ray through a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH), the BVH comprising a plurality of axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABBs); and a bounding box (BB) merge accelerator coupled to one or more execution units and coupled to a local memory in which to store a group of the AABBs, the BB merge accelerator, in response to the one or more EUs, to determine a second AABB to merge with a first AABB in accordance with a specified distance function.