mattpharr

> neither out of core tracing and sorting rays are feats of engineering

Presumably this statement based on your having shipped a production renderer that does these things?

> It has actually been done many times in both academics and commercial renderers from at least a decade ago

Academics, yes. Commercial--citation please? The only one I'm aware of is Weta's PantaRay, which is from only ~5 years ago (https://research.nvidia.com/publication/pantaray-fast-ray-tr...).

Given that this is HN, I'd encourage reading and commenting on the substance of the technical paper rather than the marketing webpage.

Those ideas have indeed been around for a long time; the paper nicely cites all of the related research work. (Including among many others, a SIGGRAPH paper I wrote on the topic 18 years ago.)

I think the paper is excellent. First, there's a big gap between academic papers on a topic and the experience of actually building a real system that works for real movies. It's unusual for people in industry to take the time to write up their experiences building these systems, so I salute their making this contribution to general knowledge about rendering systems.

It's easy to carp about "all could have been done before"; that seems like an argument that could be applied to try to dismiss just about anything.