These pruned trees enable efficient evaluation of the SDF for rendering or discretization, resulting in >100x speedups for complex scenes compared to brute-force evaluation. Come to my talk next week for more details, or read the paper here: wbrbr.org/publications...

Houdini is a good reference for this. I found having sections of a large graph shift around while authoring starts making things unaligned / overlapping so isn't something I make use of personally.