[tomvbussel]

I completely agree with you that the information in that paper is excellent and I think it's amazing that Disney is so willing to share so much information about their renderer, even though their sister company Pixar sells a renderer.

The question though is whether or not this paper should have been published at EGSR. Personally I think that an EGSR paper should either propose a novel idea or should provide a good survey of the field. I don't think this paper succeeds at either of those. Their method is 'simply' a combination of already published ideas and I don't think that they do a very good job at comparing those existing ideas.

Personally, I think this paper would have been better suited as a talk at SIGGRAPH, a publication at JCGT or a technical report (like Pixar). So: great paper, wrong venue.

[CyberDildonics]

I'm actually really glad they got the paper out there as a small pdf (and I'm actually glad they compared it to other commercial renderers). The reason is that it shows very real world performance results. Not only that but cache coherency optimization results are shocking and illuminating to many people because it seems so counter intuitive when there technically aren't more instructions being ran.

Every paper I read now I am looking for all the things that were left out, how the comparisons have been changed for each scene to make that particular algorithm look good etc.

It answered a big question lingering in my mind that I haven't been able to actually try out.