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ngod

How much slower is ray tracing as compared to rasterization for rendering similar content?

keenan

@ngod Really hard to say, but if you Google for "real time ray tracing" you'll get a sense. For instance, if you just want to render flat shaded polygons, I would guess (just a totally random guess) that ray tracing is still 10-100x slower. That's because a GPU is built from the ground up to do highly specialized calculations such as point-in-triangle tests, etc., in the hardware itself. That being said, NVIDIA's latest cards have some ray tracing hardware in them, and we're definitely headed toward a world where hybrid rasterization/ray tracing algorithms are the norm.