Chris Kohler
Culture

Why Raytracing Is (Not) The Future

Rob Beschizza over at Gear Factor has a good post on ray tracing, inspired by a guy who’s doing a raytraced version of Quake 4. Ultimately, says Rob (and I think he’s right), raytracing isn’t going to be used in video games as long as they can squeeze better results out of more kludgey shortcuts: […]

250pxraytraced_image_jawrayRob Beschizza over at Gear Factor has a good post on ray tracing, inspired by a guy who's doing a raytraced version of Quake 4. Ultimately, says Rob (and I think he's right), raytracing isn't going to be used in video games as long as they can squeeze better results out of more kludgey shortcuts:

Purely ray-traced scenes will always carry an overhead compared to the clever alternatives embodied (at least in this generation) by pixel shading, surface texturing, bump mapping and the like. Ultimately, conceptual shortcuts will continue to offer more visual bang for the processing buck than ray-tracing, if you're rendering at real-time frame rates.

Ray Tracing the Future of Game Graphics? [Gear Factor]