Comment by dahart

> I’m not sure how ray tracing done by video games can be construed a more area-based than point sample based. It seems to me like ray-hit testing is done in a point-sample manner, and games aren’t doing multiple rays per pixel.

Ignoring the denoiser, games are quite commonly using Box Filter for pixels. That’s the square in square pixels. The point sampling is in service of an integral whose shape is a square, and that’s the problem Alvy Ray is talking about.

That point sampling is distinctly different from the “point sample” that represents the pixel value itself, so let’s not conflate them. The averaging over an area that is square shaped, whether it’s multiple samples or over time, is the reason that the pixel shape is summarized as square, not as a point.