My source for the story is indirect, via Steve Parker, who’s worked with Turner. https://www.youtube.com/live/LUFp6sjKbkE?si=8vcxo-Vp8oeRUnob https://www.youtu

My source for the story is indirect, via Steve Parker, who’s worked with Turner. https://www.youtube.com/live/LUFp6sjKbkE?si=8vcxo-Vp8oeRUnob https://www.youtube.com/live/LUFp6sjKbkE?si=8vcxo-Vp8oeRUnob Scrub to 3:52:19 for the Turner Whitted story. BTW, mostly unrelated, but scrub that video to 5:47:10 for an amazing talk by Ivan Sutherland (“father of computer graphics”) that is not about graphics (he politely refuses to talk about graphics anymore :P), but about the active research he’s been doing (at 85 years old) into Single Quantum Flux circuits (an alternative to CMOS). Also- Jim Clark at 4:48:40 Jim’s idea you mention is still correct & compatible with Turner’s idea. Jim’s point is that we only need to render finite pixels. You might need an x-factor more triangles than pixels because of sampling and depth complexity and secondary lighting, so 100M polys is probably in the ball park, as long as we can quickly pick the right 100M polys in real time… In a way, Turner was talking about a lower bound, while Jim is talking about an upper bound, albeit slightly different things but they are similar, both relate to how much compute is needed for real time rendering.