Casual Shadertoy Path Tracing 2: Image Improvement and Glossy Reflections

Re:Casual Shadertoy Path Tracing 2: Image Improvement and Gl... by atq2119 on Sunday June 07, 2020 @09:27AM (#23447174)

It seems that a lot of the current games with real-time ray tracing do not actually do path tracing, they only use ray tracing for shadows and (single-bounce) reflections. Even that UE5 demo doesn't seem to do path tracing, it looks like at best they're ray tracing for iterative updates of global illumination (though that's a guess, I haven't been following that too closely). So Nvidia's use of terminology is largely correct.

Of course, the long-term goal is to have real-time path tracing, but that does seem to be a ways off still.

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Re:Casual Shadertoy Path Tracing 2: Image Improvement and Gl... by Impossible on Sunday June 07, 2020 @04:27PM (#23450498)

The UE5 demo doesn't use GPU raytracing hardware and doesn't raytraced triangles. They use a combination of voxels, signed distance fields.

Raytracing accurately describes GPU hardware, it's not a fixed function path tracer, although you can use it to implement a path tracer (Quake 2 RTX for example). Developers talk about using it for non-graphics use cases like physics, AI and audio even.

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