> The last ten years have seen a dramatic shift in this balance, and path tracing techniques are now widely used. This shift was partially fueled by steadily increasing computational power and memory, but also by significant improvements in sampling, rendering, and denoising techniques. In this survey, we provide an overview of path tracing and highlight important milestones in its development that have led to it becoming the preferred movie rendering technique today.
So when you get wowed by the next new film's stunning level of realism, you can reflect on how soon path finding might find its way into high-end gaming rigs too ;)
https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wjarosz/publications/christens... is a nice summary from October 2016.
> The last ten years have seen a dramatic shift in this balance, and path tracing techniques are now widely used. This shift was partially fueled by steadily increasing computational power and memory, but also by significant improvements in sampling, rendering, and denoising techniques. In this survey, we provide an overview of path tracing and highlight important milestones in its development that have led to it becoming the preferred movie rendering technique today.
So when you get wowed by the next new film's stunning level of realism, you can reflect on how soon path finding might find its way into high-end gaming rigs too ;)