[phkahler]

I used to dabble in real-time ray tracing. My box is from 2005 though so it was never really great. These chips should easily do moderate complexity scenes at 720p and 60fps, and that's just an 8 core. Figure 1080p 60fps with 16 cores. But then we'll go 4K and turn on a lot more features and slow it down to a crawl again...

[floatboth]

Wow, real-time raytracing at 60fps? Define "moderate complexity" :)

I've tried the Real Time Path-traced Quake 2 that's implemented with GPU shaders https://amietia.com/q2pt.html and it's… not fast and grainy.

[phkahler]

Path tracing uses a lot of rays per pixel. I do a single eye-ray and a few to the light sources for the surface intersected, and of course reflections. I do have a scheme for handling large numbers of light sources to some extent. I would say moderate complexity definitely includes a near-full-screen object of arbitrary polygon count. It may also include environments like anything from the quake series - including light sources. Of course I need to buy one of these things and try out the old code to see if we're really there yet. Until then I'm still speculating.