Cevat Yerli from Crytek on Ray Tracing and Rasterization

Cevat has given us some more food for thought with his answers to our ray tracing questions. On the positive side for ray tracing development he seems confident that IF ray tracing picks up as a general rendering method for games that it would likely develop algorithms and theory designs that would improve performance and efficiency dramatically, just as rasterization has done over the last 20 years. Anti-aliasing is one such example where raster engines have developed significant improvements for efficiency that ray tracing would likely do over time as well.

Cevat does see a future for ray tracing, but more in the form of a mixed rendering design that probably won't be implemented for several years; five or more. By his count, for the next three years or so rasterization will continue to be the dominate rendering method for games and thus any potential graphics hardware for this market will need to compatible and perform well on rasterization. Cevat thinks that in a time span of three to five years we might begin to see some implementation of ray tracing in games but not in the pure, classical ray tracing fashion. Instead we will likely see the hybrid rendering techniques that we have discussed several times in previous interviews: ray tracing for shadows, certain reflective objects, etc.