High‐Performance Elliptical Cone Tracing

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.