Abstract

For almost two decades researchers have argued that ray tracing will eventually become faster than the rasterization technique that completely dominates todays graphics hardware. However, this has not happened yet. Ray tracing is still exclusively being used for off-line rendering of photorealistic images and it is commonly believed that ray tracing is simply too costly to ever challenge rasterization-based algorithms for interactive use. However, there is hardly any scientific analysis that supports either point of view. In particular there is no evidence of where the crossover point might be, at which ray tracing would eventually become faster, or if such a point does exist at all.

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