Photorealism for the masses gets closer

With increased performance and clever algorithms Ray tracing has been one of the white whales of computer graphics. Since its introduction in the early 1980s, ray tracing has promised to bring photorealistic rendering on a broadscale, and it’s always been twoyears in the future. In those years, we have nonetheless seen it get faster, while screen resolutions have also increased. In the 1990s if you could render a raytraced 512 × 512 image in five to ten seconds you thought you really had something. We did just such a thing using 16 transputers, a 32-bit processor configured in a SIMD,