Today's GPU are probably much closer to what Renderman was doing back when Toy Story was made than you think. They used an algorithm called REYES, which has not

Today's GPU are probably much closer to what Renderman was doing back when Toy Story was made than you think. They used an algorithm called REYES, which has nothing to do with raytracing and in fact can only barely be made to combine with ray tracing at all [1]. It was completely thrown out of Renderman only on the last couple of years for that reason. REYES really is an early take on rasterization with tesselation, designed for hardware with extreme memory constraints. Although the actual tesselation algorithm works differently from GPU hardware tesselation, the basic idea of tesselating dynamically to the required level of detail for the current frame carried over intonthe hardware. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reyes_rendering https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reyes_rendering