Tasty photons!
Ray Tracing is fucking cool. Open RT is an open-source ray-tracing initiative similar to Open GL.
What’s the difference, you ask? Well, previously it required mega-intense processing power to light scenes in a realistic manner – by following the actual light from the fictional light sources. All the best animation uses ray-tracing (Lord of the Rings, for instance), but most consumer 3D products, including video games, use rasterization (aka “filling triangles”). Technically, computer-modelled ray-tracing works backwards, starting from the “camera” instead of the light source.
The point, though, is that new algorithms and new simple hardware solutions mean that we’re only a few years away (rather than the dozens we imagined) from real-time ray-tracing games on your ordinary PC.
Allow me to geek out at the possibilities for a moment.
That’s awesome news. I fear that some of the games most likely to utilize RT, though, will be sports videogame franchises. I say this, because they often seem to pursue realism as a top priority, in terms of looks as well as yearly stats. This is unfortunate, because I think it will continue the decline in overall quality.
I used to own POV-Ray back in the 90s, which was always free. But very slow. sooooo slow.