A system and a method are disclosed for ray tracing in a pipeline of a graphic processing unit (GPU). It is determined whether a ray bounce of a first ray intersects a first primitive that is the closest primitive intersected by the ray bounce. The first ray is part of a first group of rays being processed by a first single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) process. The first ray is assigned by a sorting or binning unit to a second group of rays based on the intersection of the first primitive. The second group of rays is processed by a second SIMD process. The first ray is assigned to the second group of rays based on a material identification of the first primitive, an identification of the first primitive intersected by the ray bound of the first ray, a pixel location, and a bounce number of the ray bounce intersecting the first primitive.