

Caustic Graphics' ray tracing accelerator - explanation and demo video - pavlov
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=694

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jcl
_The obvious area is in films -- much of the Pixar film work is ray traced as
are most of the final high-quality visual effects done in Hollywood._

This is a common assumption, but it turns out to be less true than you'd
expect. People associate raytracing with ultra-realistic graphics, so they
assume that realistic graphics must be raytraced. But the reality is that
graphics creators go out of their way to avoid raytracing because it is slow
and harder to tweak for artistic effect. Pixar didn't add raytracing to their
main renderer until "Cars".
(<http://graphics.pixar.com/library/indexAuthorBatali.html>)

