I’m learning about rasterization based computer graphics at the moment and it somehow bothers me that all of it might be obsolete in a couple of years when we can do path tracing in real-time. It’s such a fast moving field.
Rasterization is just too cool of a hack to avoid the tracing of primary rays. In fact, it's rather all the hardware and software hacks that evolved around rasterization for 2 decades combined that make it so, not rasterization by itself per se. Various GPU & CPU based culling methods, early & hierarchical Z-buffer, today's realtime rendering pipeline is an amazing combination of cool techniques that keeps getting better. Raytracers say "pff, with real raytracing we wouldn't need all those dirty hacks", but for one most of them come with the GPU or are well-known and intuitive to implement, plus to get anywhere near-realtime they need to implement another set of even more (and less comprehensible/intuitive/hardware-accelerated) hacks of their own.
All shading stages are also designed around rasterization and matured over the last decade. It's good fun to write some pixel-shader-based raytracer but that alone doesn't make it the better fit for current/next-gen gamedev at all.
The oft-antipicated "hybrid" approach however is finally arriving. Once you have some "depth-aware screen-space" (whether voxelized or N-layers), you can shoot specialized and rather simple rays to create diverse outstanding effects in post-process, from much smoother water surfaces to of course "screen-space raytraced reflections" (SSRR).
Besides that, what would you say to ilaksh’s comment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8060197
I don't believe that any individual school, professor or course can really be up-to-date with the most leading edge practices or even theory, especially in high technology.
I think that the only really interesting area now in computer graphics is in doing path-tracing in hardware.
There is a massive culture that still is interested in other things but I think they are behind the times.
Sooner or later nVidia or ATI/AMD will put some native capabilities for path tracing a scene (not like OptiX where you program the existing architecture for it, but circuits/architecture that is truly optimized for path tracing) given a set of geometry, materials and lights into their graphics cards.
At that point all of the rasterization and lighting calculation tricks will be obsolete.
Probably this will be buried because there is an enormous amount of effort going into those old-fashioned approaches, but oh well. I have to say it.