what is realism in realtime rendering?
Channel: Soren Renner
Date: 2013-12-21

a film laid forth like a fractal carpet at a hyperreal awards ceremony

The general belief seems to be that cinema is the best model for virtual worlds, that realism means cinematic realism. This isn't true. Ecological realism is much more important. The mistaken emphasis on cinematic realism is behind the risible belief that realtime raytracing is only interesting when 100 rays per pixel can be traced. In fact, the primary advantage of tracing, as opposed to rasterization, is seen with 1 ray per "pixel": Tracing is robust to geometric complexity, while rasterization is not, for which reason rasterized toy ("virtual") worlds have always been impoverished in geometric detail. Let's develop some intuitions about the algorithmic complexity of the tracer in complex environments, abstracting away from the tedious details of the implementation.

http://pastebin.com/fscvV1DD