Ray-Tracing disscusion

[Andir]

Deneidez said:

Well, I have been working on ray-tracer for a while and yes it is beyond the scope of todays computers(higher resolutions). Ray-tracing gives some nice things like mirrors 'for free' but in balance theres stuff you really can't do with ray-tracing without very expensive algorithms(antialiasing for example).

The main things that make ray-tracing expensive are resolution and how long you trace each ray.

Well, technically, simple AA can be done by rendering subpixel accuracy thought it requires about 4x the amount of processing to do one pixel 4 times.  You could apply some cheap bluring effects on objects within close proximity, but it doesn't always come out looking like it should.  It's not necessarily hard (in fact, raytracing if incredibly easy from my experience) but it can be very hardware intensive to get lifelike results.  I'm actually looking forward to testing out some of my rendering engines with the Larabee.  So far I've only been testing with my dual quad Core2 and I can say we are pretty close, but we still need just a bit more processing power.