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Re:800TFLOPS Multicore IC for Realtime Ray Tracing by th0ma5 on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @01:46PM (#694293)
It seems having followed this over the last several months that many argue that ray tracing is really great, and obviously the way the world works, but scene graphs and filters and such with existing matrix transformations like in DirectX and OpenGL are always going to outperform raytracing because it is just inherently simpler. However I don't do too much development in this area, so I would welcome any other perspective!
Re:800TFLOPS Multicore IC for Realtime Ray Tracing by lutorm on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @02:25PM (#694371)
I don't think it's a matter of performance, but of realism. If you want realistic calculations, you must go to a ray tracing algorithm, there's no substitute.

If you don't need 100% realism, though, you can probably make things look 99% as good with "fake" effects, with better performance.

Re:800TFLOPS Multicore IC for Realtime Ray Tracing by TrevorJ on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @04:26PM (#694603)
Correct. The "fake" effects have limitations and you can break them under certain circumstances, so raytracing is always a good choice when you aren't sure how the materials will be used and under what conditions they will be rendered.