[mschuetz]

I'm a bit sceptic of this claim. You can also produce acceleration structures for reasterized polygons, create hierachical level of detail representations of your scene and render whatever LOD is necessary. This reduces the number of polygons that have to be rendered considerably. It always seems like the claim that raytracing is faster for tens of millions of polygons due to acceleration structures misses the point that accelerations structures can also be applied to rasterization.

[corysama]

Ray tracing and rasterization are pretty much duals of each other. Enough effort put into one can achieve very similar results to the other.

Meanwhile, I don't know how much effort would be required to effectively rasterize a beach with individually modeled grains of sand. https://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-tech-of-pixar-part-1-pi...