Ray tracing vs. path tracing — which is the best dynamic lighting technique?

They both represent a massive leap in realism over more traditional “baked” lighting techniques and can even make older games look far more realistic than their blocky textures and geometry have any right to.

Recommended Videos Ray tracing works by casting a ray into a scene through the player’s viewpoint. Each time the ray interacts with an object, the effect of that object on the ray is calculated, including its color, transparency, and orientation. That ray continues to be tracked as it bounces around a scene until it intersects with a light source. That calculation is made for every pixel in a scene, making for an incredibly realistic-looking, but also incredibly demanding lighting technique.

It’s a combination of ray tracing and Monte Carlo simulation that lets the game or application use a manageable number of paths to track to a light source. This allows for ray tracing-like lighting effects with less overhead, but arguably, just as importantly, it allows for a much-greater granularity based on the capabilities of the system and the settings chosen. A greater sample size means more demand on the GPU rendering the scene, but also greater detail.

The end result in each case, though, is a rendered scene that looks as realistically lit as a ray traced one, if not more so, but with the potential for much lower overhead — especially at higher detail settings. Path tracing is also considered more effective for well-lit scenes, since it has more data to go off of, while ray tracing can be more effective at rendering scenes with lots of shadows, since it knows the real path the rays of light would take.

Lighting Path Tracing Ray Tracing RT Cores RTX

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