An apparatus and method for load balancing in a ray tracing architecture. For example, one embodiment of a graphics processing apparatus comprises: an intersection unit engine to test a plurality of rays against a plurality of primitives to identify a closest primitive that each ray intersects; an intersection unit queue to store work to be performed by the intersection unit engine; and an intersection unit offload engine to monitor the intersection unit queue to determine a pressure level on the intersection unit engine, the intersection unit offload engine to responsively offload some of the work in the intersection unit queue to intersection program code executed on one or more execution units of the graphics processor.