One reason\u00a0I love interactive graphics is that every now and then something happens in the field – programmable shaders, powerful mobile devices, DX12\/Vulkan\/Metal, VR, AR, and now this – that changes what’s possible and how we think about interactive rendering. New algorithms arise to exploit new and different functionality. It’s a fun world!<\/p>\n
Microsoft added ray tracing support to its DirectX API. And this time it’s not an April Fool’s Day spoof, like a decade ago<\/a>. Called DirectX Raytracing, DXR<\/em> for short, it adds the ability to cast rays as shader invocations. There are already a bunch of articles and blog posts.<\/p>\n Here are the resources I’ve noticed so far\u00a0(updated as I see new ones – let me know):<\/p>\n It will be interesting to see if there’s any spike of interest for ray tracing on Google’s analytics<\/a>. While I doubt having DXR functionality will change everything – it still has to be performant compared to other specialized techniques – it’s great seeing another tool in the toolbox, especially one so general. Even if no ray tracing is done in an interactive renderer that is in development,\u00a0it will now be much easier to get a ground-truth image for comparison when testing other techniques, since shader evaluations and all the rest now fit within a ray tracing fragment. Ray and path tracing, done long enough (or smart enough), give the correct answer, versus screen-based techniques.<\/p>\n\n