An apparatus and method for efficiently reconstructing a BVH. For example, one embodiment of a method comprises: constructing an object bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) for each object in a scene, each object BVH including a root node and one or more child nodes based on primitives included in each object; constructing a top-level BVH using the root nodes of the individual object BVHs; performing an analysis of the top-level BVH to determine whether the top-level BVH comprises a sufficiently efficient arrangement of nodes within its hierarchy; and reconstructing at least a portion of the top-level BVH if a more efficient arrangement of nodes exists, wherein reconstructing comprises rebuilding the portion of the top-level BVH until one or more stopping criteria have been met, the stopping criteria defined to prevent an entire rebuilding of the top-level BVH.