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A comment on 800TFLOPS Multicore IC for Realtime Ray Tracing. Parent comment

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.

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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.
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