I do agree with them that voxels are where it'll all end up, particularly at the high end of rendering. I doubt they're ready to take the next leap and abandon

I do agree with them that voxels are where it'll all end up, particularly at the high end of rendering. I doubt they're ready to take the next leap and abandon monte carlo + HACKS, which is currently state of the art. Removing the hacks and going with straight up individual wavelength photon tracing without any hacks (other than using the adjoint formulation, which simply flips the direction of the particles) is where it'll end up IMO. The amount of data and computation needed is breathtaking, but it can be done today with a large cluster, Intel E5s, SSDs, Infiniband, and thousands and thousands of low end graphics cards to carry the math load. Individual scenes are in the 1.5 petabyte range using voxels, but there's enough compute there to turn off the monte carlo hacks and just get the damn answer, every frame, like clockwork with extremely low latency, and with all geometric optics effects enabled. The cluster hardware I spec'd to do the above clocked in around $2 million 12 months ago. I doubt it's changed much since then, maybe dropped another 20-30%? That's actually incredibly low—30 months ago, it was over $100 million (and physically impossible due to space requirements). When it dropped down to $16 million two years ago, I went after funding (and failed to raise it, thus ending a 10+ year journey). Now it's down to $2 million, but I've moved on to other work. I'm sure someone, someday will take up the torch and make it happen—maybe even these High Fidelity people. And if I ever end up with "fuck you" money from the startups I'm CTOing for currently, I'll write a check and do it myself. Best of luck!