Explain Like I'm Five

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ELI5 What is Ray Tracing? And is it really that much of a game changer in video games? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

There has long been the claim that CPUs (these days GPUs, but the claim predates GPUs) that can ray trace your games with plenty of frames are just around the corner. So far that hasn't happened and most people working on CPUs/GPUs are pessimistic of it. Maybe you could raytrace something simple (tetris?) in real time, but modern games put in too many objects.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Your exactly right. If graphic quality stood still for a couple years, Ray tracing speed would catch up and be on parity. We keep pushing more polygons and other things that keep putting ray tracing behind a bit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That's kind of why it started to become feasible, right? Graphics quality has only incrementally improved over the last decade or so, vs geometrically improving in decades past

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

I mean, that's been my opinion. You can only get so many polygons and bump mapping and texture resolution, etc, before you hit a plateau. The rest is 100% lighting.

I think as things like dlss and other frame generation tech gets better, Ray tracing will eventually become the norm.