TY  - JOUR
TI  - High-Performance Elliptical Cone Tracing
AU  - Umut Emre
AU  - Aryan Kanak
AU  - Shlomi Steinberg
PY  - 2025
T2  - Computer Graphics Forum
UR  - https://ssteinberg.xyz/2025/08/28/elliptical_cone_tracing_ads/
DO  - 10.1111/cgf.70230
VL  - 44
IS  - 7
SP  - e70230
AB  - 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.
KW  - accelerating data structures
KW  - ads
KW  - cone tracing
KW  - wave tracing
KW  - bvh
KW  - kd-tree
KW  - ray tracing
ER  -