Finally have some more time to work on this. The benefit of a noise-based scene is that 1) I can easily adjust its density, and 2) I can generate it in the shader on the fly. This will help in profiling the raytracer in a variety of cases and check if it's compute/memory bound.

Once again visualizing the number of steps the raytracer takes through the voxel map (more yellow = more steps, red = hit a voxel). Looks quite surreal

Trying a new voxel scene to test memory vs compute GPU performance in my raytracer, using @xordev.com's dot noise: mini.gmshaders.com/p/dot-noise

Rewriting my voxel storage once again, this time using a two-level tree, aka chunking. Here I'm raymarching the chunks storage, where individual unrelated nonempty 16³-sized chunks are packed in some order. Quite a surreal view of the scene :)

First iteration of sparse octree traversal works! It's already about 2x faster than direct 3D texture traversal for primary camera rays, but much slower for incoherent random monte-carlo rays. Need to optimize the hell out of it now

I'm rewriting my voxel thing to use wide sparse octrees and it's going exactly as expected :)