so ray casting was from the 70's which was designed to limit the drawn ray field and its shadows for better performance to only the angles of the viewpoint(camera) which was intended to reduce the performance impact of AMD's ray marching which was way intense and complex but the traditional older ray tracing method i believe that people used to use predates ray marching as ray marching does ray tracing but adds on further more complex calculation for varied light angles so you get more real world looking lighting interacting with the environment for say surfaces like bumpy cement roads with tiny black pebbles which though casting shadow should be sort of shining and reflecting at each others shadows and have more of that uhh natural lighting look though its separate and different setting to light diffusion and it isnt light spread. the Ray tracing method cuts corners on ray marching to make it far less mathematically intense and require less environment interaction.
For example the light shafts and light rays function in the oldest of AMD display drivers you can toggle on webcams and whatever in playstation 2 probably 1 and a heap of other stuff.. cameras and anything else that uses AMD drivers and hardware (thats all computers nowadays intel/nvidia the lot now they've recently abandoned their cheap $2 nokia phone calculator chip parts they used for 20 years and gone to a really old really cheap mobile phone chip from AMD <RISC>) so your modern mobile phones from AMD can game well with all 3 enabled at once as good as nvidia/intel desktop PC's.. well well enough that its still playable.
So when my quality is cranked up thousands of times it can often look TOO bright.. but light culling is not what i want. and light diffusion looks boringly life like while hurting performance probably more than the ray tracing itself or the atmospheric/stratospheric infinity RDNA rendering.. lets be honest.. light diffusion is pretty taxing stuff on the highest quality video games lately that are good at reality simulation. but older video games like just about any ps4 title ported to PC seem to run solid 60 FPS no problem.
do i guess im wondering.. does anybody know how old the ray tracing techniques are? when did AMD first use them and could somebody give a situation where you would use one over the other? or is there any reason to NOT use all 3 at once?
can anybody prove nvidia's ray tracing isnt just using the really old AMD drivers to light shafts at everything with some high spread and glow/bloom or something?
