> Considering between then and now, we have much prettier looking games that do NOT require ray tracing for their visual effects (and can run on much fewer CPU cycles), thanks to much more "clever" techniques and algorithms (DoF, bloom, subsurface scattering, PBR, etc), and if it weren't for the RTX graphics cards setting the precedent, there would probably be more research into making things prettier without having to "brute force" things.
Unreal Engine 5 has a new lighting system called "Lumen". It seems to be visually almost on the level of normal brute force ray tracing, while not requiring any special ray traycing hardware and still running with decent performance on mid range hardware. It's a smarter approach which tries to accumulate lighting information on textures over time instead of computing everything again for each frame.
Unreal Engine 5 has a new lighting system called "Lumen". It seems to be visually almost on the level of normal brute force ray tracing, while not requiring any special ray traycing hardware and still running with decent performance on mid range hardware. It's a smarter approach which tries to accumulate lighting information on textures over time instead of computing everything again for each frame.