[beering]

Using this very nice POV-Ray render from Wikipedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Gl...

It features a lot of effects (radiosity, HDR maps, etc.) which are added on top of its basic functionality. There's been a big shift in how rendering is approached, from the old way of adding a pile of special effects onto your original non-realistic renderer, to a newer way of simulating light as it physically works and using that as the foundation of the renderer.

And there's still a lot of in-between as well, but having gone from 3ds Max's scanline renderer to 3ds Max + Mental Ray, to Blender + Cycles, it feels very different to use.

There are still some effects that Mental Ray (and it looks like POV-Ray) can do that Cycles can't. Photon-mapped caustics seems to be one, although I think LuxRender is FOSS and can do that.

[TylerE]

> It features a lot of effects (radiosity, HDR maps, etc.) which are added on top of its basic functionality

Huh? POV-Ray has supported radiosity for literally decades, since sometime around 1995.

[anthk]

Yep, I'm tired of these kids saying PovRay coudn't do shit as if PovRay had in 1997 the same capabilities of an Irix machine from 1987. They couldn't even be more wrong with that.

I remember seeing photoreallistic images made with PovRay in 1997 you coudn't even do with a GPU today in real time.

Kids today have a lot of ignorance on the 90's technologies, guess why they confuse the 80's and the 90's a lot thanks to that shitty vaporwave culture, having fake nostalgia on something they never truly experienced.

Man, I was playing 720p video under a Divx code in early 00's with a Pentium3 and multimedia was on its heayday, thus, people showing up a CGA pallete has no sense, it already was retro back in the day, you had those in the old MSDOS games you were running under W98 or DOSEmu under Linux, among the rest of the emulators for the ZX Spectrum and MSX for example.

Sorry for my rant, but I had to say it. The late 90's had nothing to do with early 90's, the technology shift we've seen it was outstanding. From DOS under a 286 in my early Elementary school, to W98 emulating Pokémon in my pre-HS days among recording TV streams in a computer, all of that in 5-6 years.

From 30Mhz and 5 1/4 floppies to ~450/600 MHZ a bunch of GB in 1999. For sure PovRay could do a lot more than these kids think.

[cambalache]

The explosion of JS and web development created a culture of people totally ignorant of the hard-learned lessons since the 1960s. That is why you see constant reinventions of the wheel, a shitty wheel at that.

[anthk]

No, I didn't mean that. I mean people today looks like disabled on looking up reliable sources and just parrot a simple opinion on software over 20 years old without looking the Hall Of Fame on its homepage.

That and their selfish issue being unable to acknowledge the 90's legacy and we could achieve in early 00's. For example their previous comment stating as if everything was invented in late 00's/early 10's and we were badly surviving with DOS and Amigas in late 90's, when, FFS, people began to emulate Amigas in '99 with UAE.

Man, we have Voodoo's and Geforce's exploded in late 90's, raytracing was done in software but we didn't do the crippled examples people is trying to show off to the rest as if it was what we truly do in the 90's. Not even close. Even a 286 could do these under half and hour or a full one, but that was the 3D lore from several years ago.

[morsch]

> From 30Mhz and 5 1/4 floppies to ~450/600 MHZ a bunch of GB in 1999.

From rare instances of people accessing their local BBS at 9600 Baud to accessing a worldwide communications network as a matter of course, often at broadband speed.

The past 20 years really have been rather dull in comparison.

[holoduke]

When you are inside a time or period not a lot of change is felt, but once you look back you can see incredible changes. You mention that last 20 years are dull. I think that the last 10 years are the era of smart phone revolution. A pretty big thing. Certainly belongs in the top 50 most impactful inventions and adoptations in human history. In 200 years from now the late 00s will be seen as the start of global connectivity.

[joefourier]

I haven't felt a lot of incredible changes in the last ten years. In 2010 I had an iPhone 4, and I don't think there is a major qualitative difference between it and the latest smartphones. The computing performance may have improved since, but apart from loading increasingly bloated websites faster and allowing for higher-quality photographs, I haven't felt any major changes.

Otherwise, the changes in lifestyle since 2010 have been incremental at best. 10 years ago I could buy most things online, watch YouTube videos, consulted Google maps, had smartphone text, audio and video chat. Now I can watch videos in 4K and the internet connection is faster, and although computer graphics have indeed improved, it is nothing like the leap from 1990 to 2000.

The only new exciting development is virtual reality, which is unfortunately still fairly niche.

There is a larger difference from 2000 to 2020, but you could do a version of the above in 2000, only in a more inconvenient and expensive manner than today, while they would be largely impossible in 1980.

[mcphage]

> Otherwise, the changes in lifestyle since 2010 have been incremental at best. 10 years ago I could buy most things online, watch YouTube videos, consulted Google maps, had smartphone text, audio and video chat. Now I can…

Now almost everyone does that. That’s the difference.

[anthk]

Not so much. PocketPC's were on par on the 1st iPhone/Android phones with similar 3D gaming/multimedia capabilities, albeit as much as expensive and not as usable.

[anthk]

ISDN was a good boost over a 56k modem too. Not DSL speeds, but bearable. With Opera and its proxy (and its awesome cacheing options) you had a pretty smooth browsing, almost a clone of DSL speed and usability standards.

[holoduke]

You are right, but the same can be said between 85 and 95. The evolution of realtime 3d graphics was insane. From some low FPS 3d line engines to full blown textured 3d engines.

[anthk]

90-96 is big enough. From the NES/Genesis/286 to the Pentium MMX and the multimedia PC playing MPEG videos and games like Quake. In some PC's you could even emulate the Genesis under DOS, and a year later, the NeoGeo fully, which was "the big thing" in the early 90's. A huge step in six years.

[SomeoneFromCA]

Yep, I played Genesys games in 1999 on K5-166 or something like that.

[thdrdt]

Cycles (path tracers) do render caustics but because rays are traced from the camera to light sources the probability that caustics are rendered is very low. This results in noise and fire flies (thats why the glossy filter is set to high in Cycles).

The solution is bi-directional path tracing but this is very hard to implement in Cycles because of the way it is built (according to the developers).