It is not incorrect because, at least for now, all those "path tracing" modes do not do compute multiple "paths" (with each being made of multiple rays casted) per pixel but rasterize primary rays and then either fire 1 [in rare occasions, 2] rays for such a pixel, or, more often, read a value from a local special cache called a "reservoir" or from a radiance cache - which is sometimes a neural network. All of this goes even against the defition your first article gives itself of path tracing :D

I don't have problems with many people calling it "path tracing" in the same way I don't have issues with many (more) people calling Chrome "Google" or any browser "the internet", but if one wants to talk about future trends in computing (or is posting on hacker news!) I believe it's better to indicate a browser as a browser, Google as a search engine, and Path Tracing as what it is.

You can not have "Path Tracing" in games, not according to what it is. And it also probably does not make sense, because the goal of real-time rendering is not to render the perfect frame at any time, but it is to produce the best reactive, coherent sequence of frames possible in response to simulation and players inputs. This being said, HW ray tracing is still somehow game changing because it shapes a SIMT HW to make it good at inherently divergent computation (eg. traversing a graph of nodes representing a scene): following this direction, many more things will be unlocked in real-time simulation and rendering. But not 6k samples unidirectionally path-traced per pixel in a game.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45061923

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42419042

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It is also true however that advances in APIs and HW desgins allowed for some parts that were troublesome at the time of GS not to be so troublesome anymore.

The whole thing is complicated by being geographically unequal: for example I think even Spain is full of affordable houses, only they are not in Madrid or Barcelona or Valencia, which is where people really want to live. So if you have a second house in an unpopular town you actually have not much - thus you are not rich - and you have often an empty house (nobody wants to rent/buy it) which is an easy target for squatters, and therefore you will become "one of the poor people ruined by squatters", while othen you are somebody who accepted the narrative that using houses as investment was a good idea, both an investment house cheaply in a town that never attracted enough people, thus "lost the game" and is now also losing the house to squatters...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39950666

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While this is true, for somebody who is starting from scratch there is a lot to learn before getting to the level at which thinking in terms of PSO is important, and it can be easier to get there via OpenGL, which btw still teaches you a decent chunk of GPU-friendly patterns (assuming of course we are talking about "modern" OpenGL and not display lists and such...). Also, with a good command of OpenGL, one can start trying to understand and re-implement rendering techniques spanning from deferred/forward+/clustered lighting, the various shadowing techniques and even HW raytracing eg. via the GLSL_NV_ray_tracingextension, which is - in my opinion - the more important side of learning GPU-accelerated rendering.

Reach out if you are interested in any way.