Ray tracing made possible on 42-year-old ZX Spectrum: 'reasonably fast, if you consider 17 hours per frame to be reasonably fast'
Ray tracing made possible on 42-year-old ZX Spectrum: 'reasonably fast, if you consider 17 hours per frame to be reasonably fast'
So true.
When I switched from basic to assembler on a Trash 80 Model 1, it was truly night and day
The strain of going from a 32 x 22 image to a 256 x 176 one is evident in how much longer this secondary image took to render. From 879.75 seconds (nearly 15 minutes) to 61,529.88 seconds (over 17 hours). Luckily, some optimisations and time-saving tweaks meant this could be brought down to 8,089.52, or near-ish two and a half hours.
Those are really reasonable values. I guess my laptop would take that long to render a 4k image as well.
So I’m not exactly sure how Blender implements this. There can be a few details that can make a huge difference. Just for starters, is Blender rendering 100% ray tracing here, or is it a hybrid model with a rasterizer. Rasterizers tend to scale with the number of objects, while ray tracing scales with the number of pixels. A hybrid will be, obviously, something in between.
Then there is how it calculates collisions. There is a way to very quickly detect collisions of AABB boxes (basically rectangles that surround your more complicated object), but it takes a little effort to implement this and get the data structures right. You can actually do Good Enough sometimes by matching every ray to every AABB, and then you do more complex collision checking against what’s left, but there’s a certain scale where that breaks down.
Blender is generally very well done from what little I know of it, but I’m not sure how it handles all these tradeoffs.
“is it still loading or did it fail?”
ah, plus ça change…
700 years worth of compute to do about an hour of gaming that I just did on my pc at home in realtime … damn.
Did I math it right? I was averaging about 100 fps in hogwarts for about an hour.