  A recent trend in real-time rendering is the utilization of the new hardware
ray tracing capabilities. Often, usage of a distance field representation is
proposed as an alternative when hardware ray tracing is deemed too costly, and
the two are seen as competing approaches. In this work, we show that both
approaches can work together effectively for a single ray query on modern
hardware. We choose to use hardware ray tracing where precision is most
important, while avoiding its heavy cost by using a distance field when
possible. While a simple approach, in our experiments the resulting tracing
algorithm overcomes the associated overhead and allows a user-defined middle
ground between the performance of distance field traversal and the improved
visual quality of hardware ray tracing.
