I mentioned in a post last week that I expected interest in ray-tracing to increase. So, there actually does appear to have been an uptick in Google searches on the term “ray-tracing,” looking at Google Trends. The last time there was as much interest was March 2010 (though other months in between have come close).
It’s a funny area to explore: South Korea seems the most interested, by far. Under “Related topics” is “NVIDIA – Company,” which is not surprising. What’s funny is that if you click that topic, you find that NVIDIA is of strongest interest in Romania, followed by Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, then Russia. I assumed the explanation is “Bitcoin,” but that’s not quite right. According to NVIDIA’s CEO, it’s actually Ethereum mining, as Bitcoins are most profitably mined by custom ASICs at this point. Such a world.
There’s a good reason that ray tracing is up in searches – Microsoft made a major announcement concerning a ray tracing API in DirectX.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2018/03/19/announcing-microsoft-directx-raytracing/
Yes, I assumed that people had read my previous post from the week before – not a good assumption. I’ve now modified the post to point at it.
Huh. I missed that post completely. I mean, I saw the one about the new edition of the book (yay!) and was wondering if it needed a new chapter about ray tracing, given recent developments, but I missed the other two posts.