Ray Tracing

[hughesjs]

I know graphical fidelity is hardly the primary goal of this project. However, that being said, Ray Traced lighting would be a big win, what are people's thoughts on getting this implemented?

From what I've seen in other systems, it's actually fairly straightforward to implement as far as lighting overhauls go.

Obviously, we'd have to hide it behind a toggle because trying to do raytracing on an IGPU would melt it...

 

[Face]

At this point, I'd say that the best strategy is to ditch the inline engine and proceed with OVP only. The past has shown that D3D9Client is basically the default graphics engine, not lacking any particular interesting feature from the inline one. So nothing stops people from developing ray tracing engines independent from the core development, sans possible API additions and the like. This way people with very old hardware can choose the OVP engine that best fits their needs.

 

[Lucy]

I agree with Face here, but I also want to point out that "Ray Tracing" is an umbrella term. If what you mean is the kind of stuff done on hardware in RTX graphics cards, that's Realtime Ray Tracing, which is a different ball game entirely, and something that a minority of Orbiter users would be able to enjoy anyway given the hardware Orbiter is mainly deployed on.