[paulhilbert]

AFAIK current state-of-the-art in pathtracing are still metropolis light transport methods. Seems like current research is mostly focussed on denoising - which makes sense, since a good denoising provides a valuable shortcut for quicker results.

While I only occasionally glance at new results in this area it seems that CNN-based denoising techniques look quite promising, possibly getting us close to viable real-time pathtracing at least for "suitable" scenes. I am more confident than ever that a shift to traced renderers could be next - this has nothing to do with RTX and the buzz around it though...

[wheelie_boy]

Metropolis has lots of advantages, but it has serious problems for realtime or animated applications, in that it tends to flicker or have noticeable low-frequency noise. This is less of a problem for stills.

RTX can absolutely accelerate path tracers, even for non-realtime applications. The underlying framework is definitely flexible enough to support a variety of rendering algorithms, it's basically accelerated BVH and intersection, with shaders to control behavior.

The biggest advancement I've seen lately is advances in denoising - the ML-based denoisers are incredible, but others are also impressive.

[kayamon]

This is slightly irrelevant but presumably someone could invent a version of Metropolis that also distributed its rays across time as well as space, thereby ensuring that any bright/flickery pixels would remain coherent across frames; i.e. once that path was discovered on one frame, it could propagate that path information out to previous/succeeding frames.

[0-_-0]

> I am more confident than ever that a shift to traced renderers could be next - this has nothing to do with RTX and the buzz around it though

You mean you being confident or the shift has nothing to do with RTX?

The purpose of RTX is to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of hardware first or software first. It's much less likely for a company to invest the effort into developing a path traced renderer without hardware support, but without software support there's no demand for the hardware. RTX is supposed to kickstart real time path/ray traced graphics.