While I was tempted to make the same statement/assumption, the breakdown in the article/tech-tear-down seems to show a near-completely ray traced frame with onl

While I was tempted to make the same statement/assumption, the breakdown in the article/tech-tear-down seems to show a near-completely ray traced frame with only a very, very small portion of rasterization usage. If this update is indicative of the AAA spaces rendering proclivities I would say your statement just isn’t true any longer. I think one of the strong suits of game graphics is the results at any cost model of rendering tech, where the focus is on using whatever methods get the best results the fastest (and hopefully within frame budgets) wins out. Since the advent of polygon rendering rasterization has been the best solution for attempts at realism (be that hyper- or photo- realism). However, rasterization and the rendering ‘shortcuts’ used to achieve certain effects were also useful for other styles of rendering. However, if every bit of graphics silicon is going to be designed and optimized for a physically based, photorealistic rendering result it may be difficult to bend that functionality toward some non-photorealistic usage. I worry everything is going to end up having the same stamped out photorealistic appearance, in a similar way to the comments I’ve seen about the emerging Unreal 5 ‘look’. And that to get away from that look will require giving up a large chunk of GPU rendering horse power.