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I'd wager that the current rasterising pipeline is more flexible than one based on raytracing - capable of generating a range of styles, not just photorealistic

I'd wager that the current rasterising pipeline is more flexible than one based on raytracing - capable of generating a range of styles, not just photorealistic ones. And therefore having an extra dedicated chip for raytracing seems uneconomical. The comparison examples given in the article were slightly ridiculous. How does a non-reflective car represents 'traditional' rendering? Look at any great AAA game and you'll see reflections, refractions, radiosity, etc., that are all pretty amazing. I don't think that general demand will be there for alternative rendering hardware for quite a while.

banachtarski 13y ago
Those reflections and refractions and such rely on raytracing though so better ray-tracing hardware will help improve traditional pipelines as well (which are increasingly getting physically based). Also, there is nothing intrinsic about the rasterization pipeline that makes it more or less flexible that a ray-tracing one. In a physically based engine, I'd imagine you would be able to inject shader code on every bounce (for bump mapping, BRDF behavior, subsurface scattering, etc) as well as when the ray hits the lens. A good system would allow you to spawn more rays as need be or modify geometry like the current tesselation and geometry shaders. I think the important thing is that a physically based model would be amazing to work with from a graphics engineer perspective. No more crazy floating point hacks or occlusion tricks to get the desired effect. I'd rather the hacks be at the hardware level than the software level.
dualogy 13y ago
> I'd wager that the current rasterising pipeline is more flexible than one based on raytracing - capable of generating a range of styles, not just photorealistic ones Nope. I'd say the "raytracing pipeline" really does replace only the rasterization step, and once the triangle to draw is "found", you do whatever shading/lighting/fx/fragshader you want to draw it with? Wouldn't this be the most sensible approach? Rasterization in lay-man's terms really is just "figure out which triangle, if any, is 'hit' at this pixel", so a historically much faster and very neat hack to avoid the tracing of a ray.. But you don't get cheap soft-shadowing / ambient occlusion / reflect-refract and you'd need to do occlusion culling seperately for current-gen "complex" scenes to avoid a drawcall for all kinds of hidden objects. That's where at some point raytracing as it becomes more feasible also becomes much more attractive. Potentially also reducing geometry-LODing headaches etc..

banachtarski 13y ago

Those reflections and refractions and such rely on raytracing though so better ray-tracing hardware will help improve traditional pipelines as well (which are increasingly getting physically based). Also, there is nothing intrinsic about the rasterization pipeline that makes it more or less flexible that a ray-tracing one. In a physically based engine, I'd imagine you would be able to inject shader code on every bounce (for bump mapping, BRDF behavior, subsurface scattering, etc) as well as when the ray hits the lens. A good system would allow you to spawn more rays as need be or modify geometry like the current tesselation and geometry shaders. I think the important thing is that a physically based model would be amazing to work with from a graphics engineer perspective. No more crazy floating point hacks or occlusion tricks to get the desired effect. I'd rather the hacks be at the hardware level than the software level.

dualogy 13y ago

> I'd wager that the current rasterising pipeline is more flexible than one based on raytracing - capable of generating a range of styles, not just photorealistic ones Nope. I'd say the "raytracing pipeline" really does replace only the rasterization step, and once the triangle to draw is "found", you do whatever shading/lighting/fx/fragshader you want to draw it with? Wouldn't this be the most sensible approach? Rasterization in lay-man's terms really is just "figure out which triangle, if any, is 'hit' at this pixel", so a historically much faster and very neat hack to avoid the tracing of a ray.. But you don't get cheap soft-shadowing / ambient occlusion / reflect-refract and you'd need to do occlusion culling seperately for current-gen "complex" scenes to avoid a drawcall for all kinds of hidden objects. That's where at some point raytracing as it becomes more feasible also becomes much more attractive. Potentially also reducing geometry-LODing headaches etc..