The real time ray tracing is a massive achievement. Tbf I never thought it would be possible to do in my lifetime (and it really isn’t, it’s a lot of impressive smoke and mirrors like reservoir sampling!) but this is really close to a path traced look considering how few samples it really is per pixel.
All that aside, what really stands out with this demo is how nice the dev experience is. Lots of bits and pieces that didn’t exist 10 or 20 years ago. It’s git clone and cargo run. The threshold for tinkering with a repo like this compared to an old C++ equivalent is extremely low. I had to try making the day/night sky dynamic and it was literally a two minute job even though I’m a rust newbie.
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 scene.
All that aside, what really stands out with this demo is how nice the dev experience is. Lots of bits and pieces that didn’t exist 10 or 20 years ago. It’s git clone and cargo run. The threshold for tinkering with a repo like this compared to an old C++ equivalent is extremely low. I had to try making the day/night sky dynamic and it was literally a two minute job even though I’m a rust newbie.