Comment by JoshTriplett
3 days ago
> You can not have "Path Tracing" in games
It seems like you're deliberately ignoring the terminology currently widely used in the gaming industry.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/should-you-bother-with-path...
https://gamingbolt.com/10-games-that-make-the-best-use-of-pa...
(And any number of other sources, those are just the first two I found.)
If you have some issue with that terminology, by all means raise that issue, but "You can not have" is just factually incorrect here.
> If you have some issue with that terminology, by all means raise that issue, but "You can not have" is just factually incorrect here.
It is not incorrect because, at least for now, all those "path tracing" modes do not do compute multiple "paths" (with each being made of multiple rays casted) per pixel but rasterize primary rays and then either fire 1 [in rare occasions, 2] rays for such a pixel, or, more often, read a value from a local special cache called a "reservoir" or from a radiance cache - which is sometimes a neural network. All of this goes even against the defition your first article gives itself of path tracing :D
I don't have problems with many people calling it "path tracing" in the same way I don't have issues with many (more) people calling Chrome "Google" or any browser "the internet", but if one wants to talk about future trends in computing (or is posting on hacker news!) I believe it's better to indicate a browser as a browser, Google as a search engine, and Path Tracing as what it is.
You should state the definitions of terms you are using (which you still haven't done) in cases where they are disputed.