Some interesting links, Rob. I didn't investigate long enough to see if their solutions were fast enough for games yet.
It's not, it's certainly not as fast as poly based rendering, but that's largely due to there being no dedicated hardware like we have now.The argument is if you tried to render a high poly scene by comparison using nothing but software the raytrace would out perform it.
The point of this post is looking to the future rather than what is available now.
but it would be a step backwards from where we are today to move to raytracing.
Explain? Correct me if I'm wrong but there's nothing that can be done with polygon based graphics that can't be done with raytraced poly free graphics. Pixel shaders etc are simply attempting to emulate what raytracing has done for years. It wouldn't make sense to tear that all down and start again.
Frequently it does make sense to tear stuff down and start again.As I said, the reason for polygon based graphics is purely historic, if real time raytracing was feasible when 3D games first started to come out it would have been used. Since then poly counts have increased, and more effects have been added to make poly based graphics more like raytraced graphics.
It wouldn't make sense to retrain every artist and programmer from scratch.
I'm not in the business but I'm pretty sure a lot of modelling is done using splines and nurbs already, it's just that it's rendered into polygons rather than kept as is. Mustang will know!