Austin Robison kindly shared with some of us his NVIRT talk slides (see my previous blog post). It sounds like these would take a few weeks to show up on the NVIDIA website somewhere. So, until then, I’ve put them up for viewing on our website. No favoritism; it’s just interesting information.

I liked his dichotomy for rasterization vs. ray tracing: rasterization is fast, but needs cleverness to support complex visual effects; ray tracing robustly supports complex visuals but needs cleverness to be fast. Sure, there are any number of counter-arguments to this split, but it has a nugget of truth at its core.