Everybody’s ragging on Nvidia’s marketing bullshit, and here I’ve been excited for real-time path tracing since about 2009 thanks to Ray Tracey’s Blogspot posts. Y’know that Quake 2 tech demo? That’s based on amateur code originally for the GTX 480. CUDA was not involved.
The value of path-tracing isn’t in fancying up hand-tweaked levels. It’s in the possibility of everything being dynamic. If you can do an on / off comparison with anything more than PS2-ass unshadowed lighting, you’ve already missed the point. If your renderer already looks pretty dang good with lightmaps and probes… yeah, just use raytracing to remove the shadowmap delay, and to update your envmaps. Give Metal Mario real reflections in real low resolution. Don’t melt a GPU to look 5% better than OpenGL. Do it to make Pixar movies look tame.
Everybody’s ragging on Nvidia’s marketing bullshit, and here I’ve been excited for real-time path tracing since about 2009 thanks to Ray Tracey’s Blogspot posts. Y’know that Quake 2 tech demo? That’s based on amateur code originally for the GTX 480. CUDA was not involved.
The value of path-tracing isn’t in fancying up hand-tweaked levels. It’s in the possibility of everything being dynamic. If you can do an on / off comparison with anything more than PS2-ass unshadowed lighting, you’ve already missed the point. If your renderer already looks pretty dang good with lightmaps and probes… yeah, just use raytracing to remove the shadowmap delay, and to update your envmaps. Give Metal Mario real reflections in real low resolution. Don’t melt a GPU to look 5% better than OpenGL. Do it to make Pixar movies look tame.