The world of ray-tracing, known for its ability to generate photorealistic images, is now at our doorstep. It's there, waiting for real-time 3D engineers to fully understand its potential. In this series of articles, I'll describe my journey of integrating this powerful new tool into my existing engine.
At 60 frames per second, you only have 16.6ms per frame. I will give you 6.6ms for your CPU tasks (updating the state of your world), which leaves me with 10ms for rendering. However, if we want to use ray-tracing, we'll need to make clever concessions.
This is a first part of a series of articles. Let's start by concretely computing the ambient occlusion.