Definitely! It's a great idea and something I've been trying out. So far I've tested typical bounding volume hierarchies and spatial acceleration structures in 1-d (e.g, some of the cache friendly quadtree designs applied to 1d, r-trees, k-d trees) but they weren't able to outperform my simple ordered map yet unfortunately.
Since you mentioned SIMD acceleration, did you look at things like QBVH[1]? I mean it would be kinda like a B-tree I suppose but with the min/max stuff.
I did look at QBVH and flattening it to a single dimension, but my understanding is that most specialized BVHs like this prefer mostly static geometry because updates are so expensive. I'd be happy to be wrong on this though - QBVH looked complicated enough that I didn't want to experiment with it without some strong signals that it would be the right direction.
From my ray-tracing days, I recall that the majority of the time spent in the acceleration structure was due to cache misses when traversing nodes.
It might be you want to use a binary partitioning algorithm or similar for just a few levels, and then have the leaf nodes be N spans in a (sorted) list, where N is somewhat large. Then you can have some fast loop to mow through the leaf spans.
Fair point. They mention they do a regular construction and then reduce it to the QBVH, so was wondering if the BIH approximate sort trick could be used effectively.
