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Comment by z3phyr | Hacker News Reader

Real time raytracing

Given slowing growth of computing power, and that ray tracing algorithms are already mature and well studied, I don't think high-sample real-time raytracing will come along for a long time.

Instead, I think de-noising based on machine-learning will be the crucial factor for real-time raytracing, as Nvidia has been showing.

I think a coming advancement will be in dispatching rays based on ML too. That is, economically deciding where to cast rays, based on feedback from the de-noiser.

Can you elaborate? I’m not familiar with the current state of graphics research. Can a high end GPU today do this, and if not, how far are the fastest high-quality algorithms from realtime today?

A high end GPU today (like GTX 10 series) can absolutely stun! Check this out,

http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/unofficial_R... [33MB PDF]

It sheds light on some ray tracing techniques with the focus on the new RTX API with DirectX12

Real time rendering portal page generally my goto for checking out new stuff in graphics and now they have a Raytracing section https://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracing.html

I am on phone right now, and will try to put more material as soon as I get back to my workstation!

Edit: Courtesy Onion2k

Note to users on mobile - link is a 33mb pdf.

Nvidia has a popular series of "RTX" gpus released in the last year, which are billed as having real-time ray-tracing capability of some sort. It is not exactly clear to me what the best ways of making use of this are yet; if you want to path trace a whole scene it's still absurdly expensive / low frame rate (check out Quake II RTX) but there are a small number of AAA games released in the past year which are making use of real-time raytracing in small amounts for more subtle graphical improvements.

This is up-and-coming, but so many people are working on making graphics shinier, it's a very crowded space.

> This is up-and-coming

Real-time raytracing is usable in games today. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/quake-ii-rtx-ray-t...

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