
Optimizing Ray Marching Through Partial Evaluation - ingve
https://pointersgonewild.com/2016/05/08/optimizing-ray-marching-through-partial-evaluation/
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versteegen
What a fantastic blog! JIT compilation/optimisation, machine learning,
computer graphics, demoscene, game development, computer languages.

The author linked to many other great articles, including one by iq, who has
many more [1]; look at those links or at iq's productions [2] if you want to
know more/see some awesome demoscene prods.

[1] [http://iquilezles.org/www/index.htm](http://iquilezles.org/www/index.htm)

[2]
[http://iquilezles.org/prods/index.htm](http://iquilezles.org/prods/index.htm)

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tgb
Isn't the author essentially proposing using octrees [1] or similar, which I
think is a standard approach at least for ray tracing?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octree)

Edit: ah, I see the proposal is to compile specific shaders for different
regions of the screen based off octree-like data.

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galonk
The author seems to believe that REYES-type rasterization algorithms are still
the state of the art, but these days everybody does physically-based
raytracing (thank $deity, so much simpler!).

This may or may not be a useful optimization for SDFs, but SDFs themselves are
kinda useless -- not able to show detail well and not practical to model with.

