historically, gfx apis went the opposite direction. fixed function pipeline was replaced by shaders. now we rely on the api basically to do rasterization and little else. i think in ray tracing you would want a similar distillation. so like yes, the ray cast operator might be wanted in the api, but i think computations like importance sampling from the conditional brdf are better left in shaders.
and beginners who just want to get triangles on the screen copy/paste a bunch of code they dont fully understand, like now :)
By "simple framework" I mean the ability to trace rays, rather than the API specifics. What I had in mind is that by being able to trace rays at all, you can very easily get all the effects on the GGP's feature list, with less effort, wider generality, and higher quality than having to code up the buffering tricks required for things like screen space reflections or percentage closer shadows.
Sadly, I doubt the copy-pasta problem is going away any time soon... I think the trend is that it's getting worse.
Maybe this misses the point of standardizing an API? Isn't there considerable value in having a simple framework that can achieve all those effects, and be shared and communicated easily with others? I'm sure a lot of studios would welcome faster dev times, fewer authoring tools, and fewer geometric limits for their rendering effects.
Also worth considering is that all those specific tricks are very limited, either in applicability or in quality or both. Screen space reflections only work on flat surfaces. PCSS still needs a hand-tuned shadow map. DOF has problems at image space contact points. Etc. Let's not oversell today's workarounds as so good they should be preserved forever.
> even if you have a better way of doing things, if it takes more CPU/GPU cycles that a hack that achieves basically the same quality, it will not be adopted. It is that simple.
That's true for any one specific game on any one specific platform. OTOH, that framing misses the trend: there has been consistent and very strong pressure towards higher fidelity, more realism, better physics, faster processors, higher resolution, and overall larger numbers of everything, ever since the first video game ever made. Ray tracing might not be adopted today, but one thing I will guarantee is that next year the CPU & GPU cycles used for rendering will exceed today, and it'll be even more the year after that. When I think about that, I feel like seeing ray tracing take over in games is inevitable.