Comment by Sesse__
3 days ago
It's not, though. The use of RT in games is generally limited to secondary rays; the primaries are still rasterized. (Though the rasterization is increasingly done in “software rendering”, aka compute shaders.)
3 days ago
It's not, though. The use of RT in games is generally limited to secondary rays; the primaries are still rasterized. (Though the rasterization is increasingly done in “software rendering”, aka compute shaders.)
As you can tell, I'm patient :) A very important quality for any ray tracing enthusiast lol
The ability to do irregular sampling, efficient shadow computation (every flavour of shadow mapping is terrible!) and global illumination is already making its way into games, and path tracing has been the algorithm of choice in offline rendering (my profession since 2010) for quite a while already.
Making a flexible rasterisation-based renderer is a huge engineering undertaking, see e.g. Unreal Engine. With the relentless march of processing power, and finally having hardware acceleration as rasterisation has enjoyed for decades, it's going to be possible for much smaller teams to deliver realistic and creative (see e.g. Dreams[0]) visuals with far less engineering effort. Some nice recent examples of this are Teardown[1] and Tiny Glade[2].
It's even more inevitable from today's point of view than it was back in the 90s :)
[0] Dreams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI
[1] Teardown: https://teardowngame.com/
[2] Tiny Glade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jusWW2pPnA0