This and with reflection you have tiny different representation of your world. RTX has TLAS and BLAS for ray traversing, your own tracing can be based on own BVH acceleration structure and SDF form of the world. So you right, you can't properly cull the world but you can have optimized version by having 1. Nice acceleration structure (hardware TLAS BLAS or software BVH/Octree (iirc octree cache-unfriendly)) 2. Simple material form representation to sample 3. Short rays 4. Initial simplified rays result like screen space reflection 5. Half screen (less rays) and temporal accumulation (even more less rays!)

Finished a blog post on modern rendering culling techniques

I tried to keep it practical: not a deep dive, but a broad overview of the main methods, tradeoffs, and how they fit together in a real renderer.

Frustum culling, occlusion, GPU-driven rendering, meshlets, Nanite, light culling, etc.