  We propose a novel ray reordering technique to accelerate the ray tracing
process by encoding and sorting rays prior to traversal. Instead of spatial
coordinates, our method encodes rays according to the cuts of the hierarchical
acceleration structure, which is called the hierarchy cut code. This approach
can better adapt to the acceleration structure and obtain a more reliable
encoding result. We also propose a compression scheme to decrease the sorting
overhead by a shorter sorting key. In addition, based on the phenomenon of
boundary drift, we theoretically explain the reason why existing reordering
methods cannot achieve better performance by using longer sorting keys. The
experiment demonstrates that our method can accelerate secondary ray tracing by
up to 1.81 times, outperforming the existing methods. Such result proves the
effectiveness of hierarchy cut code, and indicate that the reordering technique
can achieve greater performance improvement, which worth further research.
