[TomClabault]

> A better strategy is to shoot, sort, and repeat

Do we have good sorting strategy whose costs are amortized yet? Meister 2020 (https://meistdan.github.io/publications/raysorting/paper.pdf) shows that the hard part is actually to hide the cost of the sorting.

> squeeze in an adaptive sampler in the middle. Can you expand on that? How does that work? I only know of adaptive sampling in screen space where you shoot more or less rays to certain pixels based on their estimated variance so far.

[TomClabault]

After reading this paper a bit more it seems that the it focuses on simple scenes and simple materials only, which a bit unfortunate. This is exactly where ray reordering overhead is going to be the most problematic.

They also do talk about the potential of ray reordering for complex scenes and complex materials in the paper (because reordering helps with shading divergence since "all" reordered rays are pretty much going to hit the same material).

So maybe ray reordering isn't dead just yet. Probably would have to try that at some point...