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Ray Tracing
Ray tracing…the final frontier. Because of just how computationally expensive it is on regular hardware, ray tracing was the exclusive reserve of CGI movies, with the brute force grunt work done by massive server farms. PowerVR (of iPhone GPU renown) have a clever solution—implement fixed function ray-tracing hardwawre, specifically designed to handle ray-tracing workloads. The result? Mobile-class hardware that can deliver real-time ray-traced output at reasonable framerates. If fixed-function ray tracing hardware becomes more than just a pipedream (and perhaps an integral part of future desktop GPUs), we could see incredible leaps in the quality of lighting, materials, and shadows going forward.
