A technique for performing ray tracing operations is provided. The technique includes combining one or more common exponent values of a compressed box node with one or more minimum vertex mantissas of the compressed box node and one or more maximum vertex mantissas of the compressed box node to obtain one or more minimum vertices and one or more maximum vertices; and combining a minimum vertex of the one or more minimum vertices and a maximum vertex of the one or more maximum vertices to obtain a bounding box for a compressed box data item of the compressed box node.