Comment Re:Is it still relevant? (Score 2, Informative) 292
I'd much rather see developers "waste" their time making things efficient than having 1000 cores on my machine trying to ray trace every scene. What it all comes down to is coherency between threads of execution, and all of the techniques that ray tracing makes possible (primarily high frequency lighting, since that's really the only thing that can't be done in a rasterization model) have terrible coherency.
This is super important because no matter how many cores you have, the bottleneck will still be going to memory and getting the data. In rasterization, the data accesses have pretty good spatial locality, but in areas with very high frequency lighting, there is just too much data, and every pixel is hitting a different part of it. Most of the really good ray tracers set up bundles of rays that have good locality, but this is really only trying to emulate rasterization with ray tracing in order to gain some of its performance characteristics.
In short, if rasterization can't do it, then it's going to be too slow to do in real time anyways. What ray tracing does give you is simplicity of writing code and freedom to do whatever you want, but it will never have the performance characteristics to be considered real-time. Even if you did have enough compute power to ray trace your scene at full resolution at full speed, it would be unconscionable to actually do it, because of the sheer amount of electricity wasted.
This is super important because no matter how many cores you have, the bottleneck will still be going to memory and getting the data. In rasterization, the data accesses have pretty good spatial locality, but in areas with very high frequency lighting, there is just too much data, and every pixel is hitting a different part of it. Most of the really good ray tracers set up bundles of rays that have good locality, but this is really only trying to emulate rasterization with ray tracing in order to gain some of its performance characteristics.
In short, if rasterization can't do it, then it's going to be too slow to do in real time anyways. What ray tracing does give you is simplicity of writing code and freedom to do whatever you want, but it will never have the performance characteristics to be considered real-time. Even if you did have enough compute power to ray trace your scene at full resolution at full speed, it would be unconscionable to actually do it, because of the sheer amount of electricity wasted.
