[elihu]

Ray-tracing is pretty different from polygon rasterization, so to perform well and take advantage of the technology, I think games are going to have to be written from the ground up with ray-tracing in mind. That's hard to do when game developers use complex frameworks and tools that are designed around rasterizing polygons.

(It's the same kind of problem as you'd run into if you wanted to do game development in Haskell or Rust. There's no reason why that couldn't work in principle, but things get harder when you step off the well-traveled path.)

As an example, polygon rasterization is sensitive to the number of polygons, but it doesn't matter very much where they or how they move around.

Ray-tracing, on the other hand, is relatively insensitive to the complexity of the scene, but it's more sensitive to what's on screen and visible right now, and how much of the screen it takes up. Also, objects have to be stored in 3-dimensional tree structures for efficient access, and those trees have to be re-built when things move. So, rendering the Statue of Liberty in high resolution is fine, but rending a million snowflakes is problematic.

Getting good performance means being conscious of different tradeoffs, and it takes time to figure out a good balance.

[intrasight]

Excellent summary. Thanks. Hopefully this push towards ray tracing will result in more work done in addressing the points you raise.