Okay, I have seen numerous posts and videos from even top level streamers who keep mentioning Ray Tracing when talking about the general visuals of the world. This is a complete misrepresentation of the implementation we have in the sim, and Microsoft and Asobo have also been very careful not to be specific about this so more people can be duped by the marketing speil. Hopefully I can clear this up for folks:
- Ray Tracing can be and is broken down into several sub categories
- These include Ray traced global illumination, Ray traced ambient occlusion, Ray traced reflections, and Ray traced shadows.
- Where all of the above are utilized, it is effectively referred to as path tracing
- What we have in the sim is ONLY ray traced shadows, and ONLY in the virtual cockpit. Nothing else in the sim is ray traced
- For example one of my biggest gripes with 2020 also was the terrain reflections on water bodies, which display very clear artifacting indicative of screen space reflections. When the air frame is covering parts of the terrain, this occludes the reflection of the terrain around the air frame
I can show some screenshots of this later on but just wanted to get this off my mind…