Apparatus and method for general ray tracing queries. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: a hierarchical acceleration data structure generator to construct an acceleration data structure comprising a plurality of hierarchically arranged nodes associated with a graphics scene; traversal/intersection hardware logic to traverse one or more rays through the acceleration data structure to determine intersections between the one or more rays and one or more primitives within the hierarchical acceleration data structure; shape processing hardware logic to specify three dimensional (3D) shape data indicating one or more 3D shapes to be used to perform queries with respect to the hierarchical acceleration data structure; query processing hardware logic to execute queries comprising comparisons between nodes of the hierarchical acceleration data structure and the 3D shape data to generate a result indicating overlap between the 3D shapes and the nodes.