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Am I wrong, or is raytracing on an iPad an _insane_ thing to announce? As far as I know, raytracing is the holy grail of computer graphics.

It's something that became viable on consumer gaming desktops just a few years ago, and now we have real-time ray tracing on a tablet.



Why would it be? They announced the same for the A17 in the iPhone. Turns out it was a gimmick that caused over 11W of power draw. Raytracing is a brute force approach that cannot be optimized to the same level as rasterization. For now at least, it is unsuitable for mobile devices. Now if we could use the RT units for Blender that'd be great, but it's iPad OS...


iPhones with A17 already have hardware ray tracing. Few applications/games support it at present.


Gotta make the loot boxes look even shinier, keep the gamblers swiping those cards.


It is kind of crazy to look back on. In the future we might look forward to path tracing and more physically accurate renderers. (Or perhaps all the lighting will be hallucinated by AI...?)




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