Live data from Hacker News

Cornell McRay T'Racing

github.com

41–46 of 46 posts

Re: Cornell McRay T'Racing

#42
post #29

https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/kajiya kajiya currently works on a limited range of operating systems and hardware. Hardware: Nvidia RTX series Nvidia GTX 1060 and newer (slow: driver-emulated ray-tracing) AMD Radeon RX 6000 series

What other hardware would be capable enough but is not supported?

A MacBook M1 max I guess.

Re: Cornell McRay T'Racing

#44
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you qualify RTX as "realtime raytracing" then it has been possible for a long time now. Of course this uses way more smoke and mirrors :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qw5bavWxBs https://web.archive.org/web/20110519050817/http://exceed.hu/...

No I mean it in the sense of using ray tracing for the full Global Illumination of a full game scene. Obvs there are lots of titles some a few years old where RTX is used for specific effects like specular reflection or ambient occlusion but where the lighting is still traditional. Ray marching a SDF based scene is also pretty easy but that’s more like a world inside a shader than anything resembling a full game scen…

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition uses RT for basically all lighting, doesn't it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbpZCSf4_Yk

Same with Minecraft RTX https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/updates/ray-tracing

Though both still calculate the lighting over several frames, so if you want to be pedantic you could argue that it's not strictly real time.

Re: Cornell McRay T'Racing

#45
post #5

I'm sincerely hoping that whoever wrote this is a hockey fan. (for those who aren't, Connor McDavid is arguably the best hockey player alive today)

It is probably a play on Collin McRae. But McRae died under tragic circumstances and to me it felt slightly odd to allude to his name in this manner.

He also had a brilliant career as a driver, and people remember him very fondly. It's about the way he lived, not the way he died.

Re: Cornell McRay T'Racing

#46
post #30

I'm not sure people appreciate how many hours of "hacks" are going to disappear nearly overnight when real time ray tracing becomes common place. Things as conceptually simple as "soft shadows" have multiple manifestations and implementations, and require dozens of hacks to pull off believably.

Slightly confused about what you mean here. As I understand it, ray tracing is just one of a few different global illumination approaches. In my graphics course many years ago, we implemented radiosity, photon mapping and path tracing, and they were better for some kinds of scenes than straight forward ray tracing. Some of these approaches support soft shadows very naturally, but ray tracing is not one of them - good soft shadows with ray tracing still involves some hacks.
Post reply on HN