PBR proved that we reached the point where the industry had enough of hacks in some domains. Everybody in CG knows that raytracing is the graal in that it allo

PBR proved that we reached the point where the industry had enough of hacks in some domains. Everybody in CG knows that raytracing is the graal in that it allows a unique, universal rendering model and that triangle-based techniques are always hacks aimed at approximating a raytracing result (or even better, a radiosity-based algorithm) We have always surfed on the edge between cramming more millions of triangles in our graphic cards and being able to make a complex calculation per pixel. It is arguable that if hardware manufacturers had taken a different path, GPUs would be more comfortable with raytracing now as it requires a very different architecture (make lookups in a big scene cheap vs matrix operations) From time to time, big player test the water with raytracing and often are not followed by the crowd of developers afraid to change their ways. I wish that one day we cross that bridge.