4 ms·

Why wouldn't some form of ray tracing or path tracing eventually take over once we have the necessary hardware and software and standard APIs to do it at high r

• alkonaut 8y ago
  If there is a limit to FPS and resolution where we say “ok that’s enough” then we could ray trace more with the yearly advances in computing power. And I really thought at one point that was 1080p. But later I thought it was 2k, then 4K, then 2x8K (per eye in VR). Now I honestly have no idea what the “endgame” is, but if it’s say 8K@120 for single screens and twice that for VR then thats two to there orders orders of magnitude away from what a regular gaming card does today. The problem with numbers that big is that it’s hard to say what the tech landscape is. The killer feature of rasterization is that it gives an illusion of correctness at a millionth of the computational effort. Apart from efficiency I can’t see many attractive properties.
  • Retric 8y ago
    For VR at 120fps you can do eye tracking and only render part of the image at 8k and keep the rest at much lower resolutions. Interlacing 8k images at 120 FPS is also viable. Also, resolution has increased really slowly over time, people generally don't really care that much. 1080p is 20 years old at this point.
  • haldean 8y ago
    Pro games are often played at 2K@240 now; it never ends
• Retra 8y ago
  If you can do ray tracing fast, you can do rasterization faster. And so if the ray tracing is not critical, you're wasting time computing it.
  • elihu 8y ago
    I don't think it's a waste of time. Ray tracing puts you on the path to real-time global illumination, which I think everyone is going to want if it's in reach. It also makes a lot of non-graphics tasks easier, like determining line-of-sight visibility between arbitrary points in the scene or doing collision detection. Besides, computational power isn't something we necessarily need to conserve for its own sake. We stopped using Gourad shading when the hardware became fast enough that we didn't need it anymore. Polygon rasterization will stick around for a long time I think, but I don't think it will always be an essential part of everyone's real-time rendering technology stack. http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html > I can already tell you what's going to happen to all those extra cycles that faster hardware is going to give us in the next hundred years. They're nearly all going to be wasted. > I learned to program when computer power was scarce. I can remember taking all the spaces out of my Basic programs so they would fit into the memory of a 4K TRS-80. The thought of all this stupendously inefficient software burning up cycles doing the same thing over and over seems kind of gross to me. But I think my intuitions here are wrong. I'm like someone who grew up poor, and can't bear to spend money even for something important, like going to the doctor.
    • Retra 8y ago
      "Real time rendering" mostly means games, and performance is a very very easy bottleneck to hit for games. Because it is easy to make things more fun and interesting by scaling them up: more entities, more interactions, more options, etc. So I believe you are quite wrong. It is trivial to scale-up a simulation to the point where you're at a performance bottleneck. The only reason we don't scale things up today is because our computers are far too slow to handle it. And we stopped using Gouraud shading because it is horrendously ugly. We'd still be using it still if it looked half as good as rasterization does.
      • fyi1183 8y ago
        Gouraud shading and rasterization are not mutually exclusive. Rasterization is a technique for getting from polygons to pixels, gouraud shading is a technique for assigning colours to those pixels. Even flat shading is usually done with rasterization.