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To: golfbum who wrote (243227)	11/3/2007 2:57:50 PM
From: graphicsguru	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

after thinking about it a bit i realized that 2d and video will still benefit from having a "legacy" video system similar to today's integrated graphics. Yes, I think that if we end up with an interactive ray tracing API, it will be in addition to the current standards and will not replace them. It's hard to do better than scan conversion for the first bounce -- it has spatial coherence in its favor, the math is simpler, it pipelines well, and there've been a whole lot of legacy effort in hardware and software to optimize it. For secondary rays (from an object to a light or another object instead of from an object to the eye/camera), however, it would not surprise me if ray tracing starts to become popular. With scan converted shadows, there are annoying shadow map resolution and offset issues that rear their ugly heads more often than you'd prefer Of course, ray tracing can also bump into precision issues I've seen ray traced images of very thin surfaces where the rays were erroneously calculated to hit the backsurface rather than the front. Just another reason to keep the dynamic range of distances in your CG geometry under control. If you have sub-1 mil thick surfaces on a model of a whole city, you're probably asking for trouble . . . especially if you ever see them anything close to edge-on. But most of the time, DP is good enough.