
Raytracing Myths - fogus
http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2011/09/raytracing-myths.html
======
Patient0
I'd love to know where this guy works now.

I've always thought it would be cool to do computer graphics programming but
never been sure which sort of companies pay for guys like this to work for
them.

All I could find was this: <http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2010/12/leaving-
ea.html> indicating that he _used_ to work for EA in Canada.

~~~
mchouza
He works at Relic: <http://twitter.com/#!/kenpex>

------
sambeau
Make sure you read the debate in the comments. It's as fascinating as the
article.

------
jasonwatkinspdx
While the article is accurate about how one can apply spacial subdivision to
rasterization to cull primitives, there's a significant different in the
details.

With raytracing, we always know exactly when we're done, because our outer
loop iterates over each primary ray, and we trace that ray to its closest
intersection.

With rasterization if we want some sort of early exit we have to keep track of
what regions of the zbuffer remain unwritten. The problem is, we don't know if
a "hole" in the zbuffer is going to be written to later by some primitive, or
if it's just a hole to the background far plane in the scene. So a single gap
can force us to rasterize all primitives in the fustrum. The natural scheme of
coping with this is to subdivide into tiles and render each independently, but
it remains a problem that it's difficult to know when you're "done" doing some
early exit from rasterization.

------
Geee
Well, I think it's inevitable at some point to switch to ray tracing; it being
much simpler. Moore will do it's job in a couple of years, and maybe some
architectural changes will help the change. The article talks about primary
ray rendering vs. rasterizing, but I'm not sure if secondary rays
(reflections) are feasible at all with raster engine. Thus, the complexity
figure could also mention number of bounces and the advantages of ray tracing
therein.

~~~
erichocean
They are (sort of) if you precompute things, and fake it in the shader. See
Precomputed Radiance Transfer for one technique.

------
erichocean
A path-traced game: [http://raytracey.blogspot.com/2011/09/720p-video-of-
unbiased...](http://raytracey.blogspot.com/2011/09/720p-video-of-unbiased-
stunt-racer-hd.html)

The blog is pretty sweet too.

