Sub-triangle opacity masks for faster ray tracing of transparent objects

We propose an easy and simple-to-integrate approach to accelerate ray tracing of alpha-tested transparent geometry with a focus on Microsoft (R) DirectX (R) or Vulkan (R) ray tracing extensions. Pre-computed bit masks are used to quickly determine fully transparent and fully opaque regions of triangles thereby skipping the more expensive alpha-test operation. These bit masks allow us to skip up to 86% of all transparency tests, yielding up to 40% speed up in a proof-of-concept DirectX (R) software only implementation.