The ray-tracing world - known to generate photorealistic images - is at our door. It's there, waiting for real-time 3D engineers to fully understand what it can do for them. In this series of articles, I'll describe my adventure to integrate this powerful new tool within my existing engine.
At 60FPS, you get 16.6ms each frame. I give you 6.6ms for your CPU stuff (updating the state of your world), which leave me with 10ms for rendering. If we want to ray-trace things, that's not a lot, we'll need to make clever concessions.
This is a first part of a series of articles. Let's start concretely and make a pass computing the ambient occlusion.