What is ray tracing and how does it work?
In the real world when you see something, what youre seeing is a photon from a light source.
On its way to you, that photon may have been reflected by one or more surfaces.
Each reflection changes the characteristics of the light that reaches your eyes.
The sun emits a broad range of colours of light, each surface absorbs some light and reflects others.
Each reflection affects every future surface that the light interacts with, changing its intensity and the visible colour.
Ray tracing is a graphical technique that follows the same principles.
Simulating this would be an insanely intensive process that produces a mostly wasted result.
To reduce the workload, ray tracing works in reverse, projecting rays from the camera.
Why does Ray Tracing look so much better?
The standard method of rendering scenes in real-time involves using precomputed lightmaps and whole scene lighting.
Ray tracing can achieve a photorealistic result if some extra work is done in the game design stage.
Ray tracing allows accurate reflections and shadows to be cast as part of the rendering process.
in traditional rendering methods, both of these effects are entirely optional and can cause significant performance hits.
Ray tracing itself comes with a massive performance hit.
