The present invention relates to a ray tracing apparatus and method with improved performance, the apparatus comprising: a tree build unit (TBU) for building a spatial partitioning structure; a ray tracing unit (RTU) for performing ray tracing on the basis of the spatial partitioning structure; and a control unit for adaptively controlling a balance with respect to operation performance of the corresponding units by monitoring the load state of each of the tree build unit and the ray tracing unit.