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Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of Pacific Graphics 2025)

High-Performance Elliptical Cone Tracing

Umut Emre iD , Aryan Kanak , Shlomi Steinberg iD

First published 1 October 2025DOI: 10.1111/cgf.70230

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Abstract

In this work, we discuss elliptical cone traversal in scenes that employ typical triangular meshes. We derive accurate and numerically-stable intersection tests for an elliptical conic frustum with an AABB, plane, edge and a triangle, and analyze the performance of elliptical cone tracing when using different acceleration data structures: SAH-based K-d trees, BVHs as well as a modern 8-wide BVH variant adapted for cone tracing, and compare with ray tracing. In addition, several cone traversal algorithms are analyzed, and we develop novel heuristics and optimizations that give better performance than previous traversal approaches. The results highlight the difference in performance characteristics between rays and cones, and serve to guide the design of acceleration data structures for applications that employ cone tracing.
High-Performance Elliptical Cone Tracing — research figure

Cite this work

Umut Emre, Aryan Kanak, Shlomi Steinberg. 2025. High-Performance Elliptical Cone Tracing. Computer Graphics Forum, 44(7), e70230. https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.70230

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@article{emre2025cones,
  author = {Umut Emre and Aryan Kanak and Shlomi Steinberg},
  doi = {10.1111/cgf.70230},
  journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
  keywords = {accelerating data structures, ads, cone tracing, wave tracing, bvh, kd-tree, ray tracing},
  number = {7},
  pages = {e70230},
  publisher = {Wiley},
  title = {{High-Performance Elliptical Cone Tracing}},
  url = {https://ssteinberg.xyz/2025/08/28/elliptical_cone_tracing_ads/},
  volume = {44},
  year = {2025},
}