Ray tracing: Strengths and opportunities

With the surge of interest in ray tracing for interactive rendering, it is worth reviewing what benefits this algorithm has to offer, and what challenges lay ahead. Some characteristics of ray tracing fit well with modern computer architectures, others become more difficult to use as processors evolve, and a few ray tracing “features” are probably distractions. The evolution of various computational elements—processing power, cache, bandwidth, latency, I/O—affect ray tracing differently than they do rasterization. At the same time, the boundaries between these two rendering methods is blurring as algorithmic elements from ray tracing become implemented in GPU shader code. This presentation explores how ray tracing contrasts with Z-buffering in its current form, and makes some predictions about possible futures.