Why is tree traversal the fastest ray-box method?

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I'm learning ray tracing (the problem of intersecting a ray, aka a vector, against a 3D box defined by a max and a min point) and I'm wondering: why is a tree traversal (e.g. bounding volume hierarchies) to find bounding boxes to intersect the fastest and most effective way to deal with it?

Isn't there any other way to find which box a vector intersects?