3 ms·

Can this be termed as the near saturation of Game Engine technology? Or there are still many undiscovered ways in the tech stack to make it work?

• gavanwoolery 11y ago
  as far as polygon stuff goes, your hands are more or less tied - there are only so many tricks you can use. I am finding a lot more flexibility with SDF, not just in terms of performance tricks but rendering in ways that are difficult with polygons, like warping the direction of rays to produce different transformations or deformations in objects.
• dietrichepp 11y ago
  There are a lot of undiscovered techniques. However, triangle rasterization is currently supported by widespread consumer ASICs with competing, but compatible libraries. It hits a "sweet spot" of performance and results given current hardware. Current predictions are that path tracing will get more common, since the computation cost won't be prohibitive, and path tracing can handle shadows and reflections more easily AND more accurately. SDFs are currently the structure of choice here, but I'm sure we'll see a lot of improvement. For an example of the kind of improvement, think about how depth buffers are implemented. They're not just arrays of depth values, but they're hierarchical data structures which allow entire fragments to be queried at once. The same kind of optimizations for 3D SDFs might get hardware support in the future, but who knows?