alt Hacker NewsVery cool. Enjoyed playing with the "bounces" slider - it's fascinating how little improvement each additional bounce contributes after about 3 bounces. Severely diminishing returns in terms of the final image quality.
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Maken • yesterday at 4:26 PM
That's why virtually every renderer stochastically discards indirect paths with low contribution. Looking at the source code, this one computes every subsequent bounce, even those hitting the perfectly blue sphere after hitting the perfectly green one.
Demonstrates how important it is to match the scenes with the rendering techniques. You can easily create a corridor with a light at one end that requires lots of bounces for the light to get to the end. But in a game you can just decide to not create that kind of scene. Cyberpunk 2077 basically has no rooms without direct light in them, which makes the game look good even without ray tracing.