It's not new, it's just hyped to hell by nvidia's marketing department. And real-time raytracing is not new either. There are demos which include real-time raytracing since the late 90s at least. There was a whole demogroup in the early 2000s dedicated to realtime raytracing (nature suxx). When the PS3 first came out with the cell processor, one of the tech demos they were showing to hype it up was realtime raytracing. Papers regarding hardware accelerated realtime raytracing on PC GPUs where published 10 years ago. I gave a talk about parallel programming and taking advantage of GPU parallelism, where I used realtime GPU raytracing as the example in 2013.
The only thing that's new, is the new nvidia architecture, and the new raytracing APIs which makes it easier and faster. But it's an improvement, not a revolution they're trying to pass it as.
What I am fascinated with, and this is because NVIDIA was talking about it so much, I started looking into facts about what we know about "rays" and reproducing it. The math and engineering was done long ago, before any real electronic computer. The paper I saw on what it takes was from 1953 from RCA and I cannot find it again.
I remember in the 80s and 90s, software that would create raytraced output. Povray comes to mind.
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