One of the surprising characteristics of ray tracers is that if you've got a reasonably efficient acceleration structure, they're relatively insensitive to scen

One of the surprising characteristics of ray tracers is that if you've got a reasonably efficient acceleration structure, they're relatively insensitive to scene complexity. Say you're rendering ten thousand triangles at a certain framerate, and then you bump the resolution of your meshes up so that you've got a hundred thousand triangles. The framerate drops a little bit, like maybe 20 percent or so, but it's nowhere near a linear slowdown. You can always slow the rendering times way down by adding a lot of reflection and refraction, but those are things you can't really do in a general and physically-correct way in a polygon rasterizer.