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I don't have windows installed, so I can't play with your program, but the hints are very welcome! I am not really aiming for realtime rendering, let alone realtime sampling of the volume (I still have this crazy plan to go with very high iterations, and possibly very deep zooms later on with multiprecision arithmetic). But I am trying not to rule it out by a bad software design.

It seems as if I could store an octree node in just 32 bits (at least for the case of truly binary voxel data), and still do reasonably fast ray traversal. This is loosely inspired by the realtime ray tracer of Saarland University, the OpenRT project. Their publications are a good read.