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Is ray-tracing a very large improvement for rendering quality or do you have diminishing returns now that "conventional" rendering techniques already employ suc
by Sol- 8y ago
Is ray-tracing a very large improvement for rendering quality or do you have diminishing returns now that "conventional" rendering techniques already employ such good heuristics and approximations to make the scenes look good?
Just curious since I don't know much about the state of the art of rendering and the implication of ray-tracing (other than the fact that it's, somewhat trivially by how it works, the most accurate method).
- mattnewport 8y agoA lot of the clever tricks employed to get effects like reflections, ambient occlusion, soft shadows and GI effects using rasterization are 'hacks' with a lot of edge cases and artifacts. They're not terribly robust. Ray tracing let's you get better quality with fewer artifacts because there's less 'cheating' going on. You can get better quality in more situations with less manual tweaking, if you can afford the performance cost. Artifacts around the contact points of shadows and reflections and artifacts for reflections and ambient occlusion of off screen objects are places where ray tracing can give much better visual results.
- SolarNet 8y agoRay tracing replaces parts of the pipeline that are using heuristics and approximations that are at their limits with the "correct" solutions (because ray tracing is physically correct). The problem is that there probably aren't better techniques for these approximations that aren't marginal improvements, we've started to hit a limit of what we can achieve (with physically based rendering being the target; stylized rendering still has plenty to explore) with classical rendering. Ray tracing has always been the future of graphics, we are slowly getting there. So it should provide a standard "generation" worth of increase in graphical quality.