!rant

Some days ago I finished "Ray tracing in a weekend" (Peter Shirley) and I'm learning a lot :D

In the new year I will start with "Ray tracing the next week", but there are still some things I want to tackle before that (improve code quality, optimize... it's my first project that is bigger than a codeforces problem solution, a part from the projects at work).

Any sources of wisdom and recommendations are welcome!!

Nvidia makes real time ray tracing and a ehole bunch of graphics stuff beyond our imagination but they can't make a linux driver that actually works well... For ducks sake

Swear to god if people don't stop calling the new RTX cards true ray tracing I'm going to ring their necks...

It is far from true ray tracing, it's a hybrid with ray trace base technology... Pls stop

WHY THE FUCK! WHY THE FUCKING FUCK! DO I HAVE TO WAIT 3 FUCKING DAYS TO GET A FUCKING VIDEO RENDERED! i didnt buy a new fucking 2080TI for this! WHY THE FUCK DOES THE CPU RENDER THE FUCKING VIDEO!
I mean, we can do fucking REAL TIME RAY-TRACING! And yet, no fucking idiot came to the Idea, "hmm we could let the GPU its intended purpose and dont use the CPU that much." I MEAN, IT HAPPENED, BUT FUCK IT! FUCK ALL OF THIS! FUCKING 74 HOURS!! FOR AN HOUR CLIP!
(Its 4K tho)
Fuck.

New idea: Fuck raytracing for global illumination because you just need too many rays for it to converge

What if we do surfels (to keep the number of probes down and relevant to our scene) and we update the 4x4-ish sized hemisphere irradiance maps not by tracing a single ray per frame per surfel. I have a fast as shit compute shader rasterizer... What if I just raster each surfel each frame? Should be around the same number of pixels as the primary visibility so totally feasible....

Each frame just jitter the projection a bit and voila. Should have extremely high quality diffuse global illumination at well below 1 ms. Holy shit this might just work

I was looking through some shader videos and wanted to see how hard it is to write one, and after some research I am now confused.

Are shades just basically fancy filters like black and white filters and those shitty Snapchat colour filters or is there a particular trait with shaders that diffferes them from filters that I am missing?

I always thought that shaders were all about ray tracing/marching and obtaining the effects that way.