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In addition to the examples other have given where it improves the visuals, raytracing can make developing a game easier. Currently, game developers spend huge

In addition to the examples other have given where it improves the visuals, raytracing can make developing a game easier. Currently, game developers spend huge amounts of time cooking up scene specific lighting hacks, things that make no physical sense but result in the visual appearance they are after. Another hack is dynamically computing an environment map for a shiny object (that is, rendering the scene from the vantage point of the object) so it can be used as a texture to model first order reflections. It is infeasible to compute that dynamic environment map for every object, so the art department picks and chooses which assets get reflections and which don't. Or maybe an environment map is computed from the vantage point of the centroid of a car, which is used for all reflections (windshield, bumpers, roof, hood), and that works OK for objects which are far away from the car. But if there are any objects near the car, the reflection angles are wrong in different ways on different parts of the car. With raytracing, a lot fewer hacks are needed. Yes, what nvidia is offering here is a hack in its own way (denoising, neural net upscaling too), but is one hack which applies to all cases, vs the old way of needing to create a different hack for each situation.

_dps 6y ago
> scene specific lighting hacks, things that make no physical sense but result in the visual appearance they are after. The flip side of this is that physically realistic shadows aren't always what you want. Any amateur photographer who has noticed just how awful hard shadows are on faces on clear sunny days has learned this lesson the hard way. To quote a graphics professor of mine (tongue in cheek), "Physically accurate rendering is a crutch for people who aren't smart enough to cheat their way to the look they want".

_dps 6y ago

> scene specific lighting hacks, things that make no physical sense but result in the visual appearance they are after. The flip side of this is that physically realistic shadows aren't always what you want. Any amateur photographer who has noticed just how awful hard shadows are on faces on clear sunny days has learned this lesson the hard way. To quote a graphics professor of mine (tongue in cheek), "Physically accurate rendering is a crutch for people who aren't smart enough to cheat their way to the look they want".