I think part of the point of moving to ray tracing and physically correct global illumination is that if the technology stack works right you don't actually hav

I think part of the point of moving to ray tracing and physically correct global illumination is that if the technology stack works right you don't actually have to work very hard to get your assets to look good. Let's take for example Second Life. The content is almost all user-generated, and when it originally came out it looked a lot worse than other games that were available at the time. The difference is mostly: since the content is user generated, you don't have some army of artists touching up the textures and pre-baking the lighting to make everything look at least plausibly realistic. What Second Life was missing was the technology to compute global illumination in real time against arbitrary content so that the user-generated assets look as good as if some artist had specially lit and textured each one. (Maybe even better, because computers are more thorough and exact than humans -- assuming exactness is what you want. Artists sometimes take creative liberties because unrealism sometimes looks better.) I haven't paid attention to Second Life in a long time; if a few minutes looking at random youtube videos is any indication, it seems they haven't really made much progress on this front. I think eventually companies will figure this out. I haven't paid attention to Facebook's Metaverse project because I expect it to be a flop (for non-technical reasons), but maybe they're banking on the graphics technology being there to make user-generated content look not-fake. I think that part might be achievable now with modest hardware. As far as this new paper goes, I'm not sure if it makes things easier or harder for content creators. It seems like it makes the rendering stack more complex and harder to understand, but if someone can supply came creators with awesome textures and they don't have to care where they came from or how they work then maybe that's fine.