Ray tracing is a buzzword that’s generating huge amounts of excitement (or hype, depending on your point of view) as the way forward for real-time graphics. It is widely used today for creating ultra-realistic renders for advertising and movies but in these cases, it can take hours to generate each frame even on today’s massively powerful compute servers. Ray tracing is a lighting technique for 3D graphics that mimics this real-world approach and while it produces the most realistic results, the process has traditionally been too complex for computers to create 3D graphics in real-time. As light hits objects and surfaces, rays bounce, break, and reflect in various ways until they eventually reach our eyes it is this complex interaction that creates our view of reality. The world around us is filled with billions of light rays emitted by the sun or other artificial light sources.
