| > There were no real new ideas in that paper that were worth publishing. The real world speed improvements from specific methods are the significant part. There are many ideas floating around, not all of them work out once you discover all the comparisons and data omitted from an academic paper. >I do think you should give them more credit on the engineering side though. Using large amounts of geometry has been done before, but renderers such as RenderMan and Arnold require that all geometry fits in the memory at once. This is out of core tracing and is great that they implemented it, but neither out of core tracing and sorting rays are feats of engineering. It has actually been done many times in both academics and commercial renderers from at least a decade ago. SIMD is also used to various extents in any decent renderer to varying degrees of success. Sorting into packets isn't the only way to use SIMD, or even the only way to use to scale SIMD use to wider lanes. Interestingly Skylake should have fast gather/scatter operations which will change the effectiveness of various techniques. Basically good design choices and some practical knowledge from trial and error has been heavily exaggerated by marketing. I would guess that the actual render programmers would say the same. This isn't a breakthrough, it is a refinement and that's good enough. I love what they did, but to carry the torch that the impossible was made possible is disingenuous. |
Presumably this statement based on your having shipped a production renderer that does these things?
> It has actually been done many times in both academics and commercial renderers from at least a decade ago
Academics, yes. Commercial--citation please? The only one I'm aware of is Weta's PantaRay, which is from only ~5 years ago (https://research.nvidia.com/publication/pantaray-fast-ray-tr...).