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> Isn't there considerable value in having a simple framework that can achieve all those effects, and be shared and communicated easily with others? historical
by blt 9y ago
> Isn't there considerable value in having a simple framework that can achieve all those effects, and be shared and communicated easily with others?
historically, gfx apis went the opposite direction. fixed function pipeline was replaced by shaders. now we rely on the api basically to do rasterization and little else. i think in ray tracing you would want a similar distillation. so like yes, the ray cast operator might be wanted in the api, but i think computations like importance sampling from the conditional brdf are better left in shaders.
and beginners who just want to get triangles on the screen copy/paste a bunch of code they dont fully understand, like now :)
- dahart 9y agoI think the distillation is there already; if you want conditional BRDF importance sampling in DXR, it goes in the shaders, they're not providing that kind of fixed functionality in the same way that rasterization APIs used to. By "simple framework" I mean the ability to trace rays, rather than the API specifics. What I had in mind is that by being able to trace rays at all, you can very easily get all the effects on the GGP's feature list, with less effort, wider generality, and higher quality than having to code up the buffering tricks required for things like screen space reflections or percentage closer shadows. Sadly, I doubt the copy-pasta problem is going away any time soon... I think the trend is that it's getting worse.