[corysama]

"Practical Parallel Rendering" is a great book for anyone. It really is "Parallel Work Distribution Options: The Book".

The argument that "Ray tracing is logarithmic in scene complexity while rasterization is linear. Therefore, ray tracing will win eventually!" ignores the fact that rasterizers also use hierarchical graphs to maintain logarithmic complexity just like ray tracers do. You could make the same argument if you compared a well-designed rasterization-based system vs. a naive ray tracer that brute-forces every triangle vs. every pixel.

The difference is really a focus on local vs. non-local data. Rasterizers focus on preparing data ahead of time so that it can be directly indexed without searching. Ray tracers focus on making global searching as fast as possible. Rasterizers do more work at the start of a frame (rendering shadow, reflection, ambient occlusion maps). Ray tracers do more work in the middle of the frame (searching for shadowing/reflecting/occluding polygons).

It's wonderful that we finally have both accelerated in hardware. HW ray tracing still has a very long way to go. Currently, budgets are usually less than 1 ray per pixel of the final frame in real time apps! Figure that out how to use that effectively! :D But, it still opens up many new possibilities.

[pixelpoet]

I (lycium) wrote a bunch on this topic on a recent thread on reddit r/hardware, with many similar points: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/enn41z/when_do_yo...

[sitkack]

Isn’t < 1 day per pixel totally ok because of the DNN denoising kernels? One could even train the de loser on offline computer frames indicative of the specific scenes.