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.
Does this harm nvidia? I don’t do graphics programming but I would imagine they have a lot of tech to make shadow and many other hacks run fast. Does ray tracing simplify game rendering even though it would require more FLOPS?
> Does ray tracing simplify game rendering even though it would require more FLOPS?
In theory it will, the VFX/CG industry went through the rasterisation -> raytracing change ~10 years ago, as it simplified things (at least in the pipeline, and in the renderers themselves to some degree). It was slower in terms of compute time than rasterisation, but made up for that by not needing things like irradiance/pointcloud caches, shadow map passes, etc (the removal of which made total iteration time faster), and the fidelity it allowed was quite a bit better (global GI, accurate layered materials traced through the surface, volume SSS, etc, etc).
In terms of renderer complexity, it means that while you have to specialise how you use the rays (ray casting/tracing is really just a visibility query), it means you can use them for camera visibility, reflection, refraction, shadows, environment quite easily in a very similar manner (especially with path tracing), whereas with rasterisation, you need rasterisation for the main tri/quad drawing, then (cascading) shadow maps for shadows, then cube mapping for environment lighting/reflection, and these for rasterisation are very different techniques / algorithms.
