[aarongeisler]

Great post. There are lots of nostalgic game references here. I still remember being blown away by the shadows in the N64 Zelda many years ago.

I expect area lights and soft shadows to become the norm as ray-traced techniques are adopted. If you have the hardware, it's worth checking out Quake 2 RTX to see what the future might look like.

Lastly, I've added your blog to my growing list of graphics resources: https://github.com/aaron9000/c-game-resources

[lawlessone]

Honestly if they can get good enough shadows with smoke and mirror trickery i'd prefer they stick to smoke and mirrors for performance reasons.

[aarongeisler]

Agreed. Even with a top-end GPU I almost always turn off RT features. I expect we will continue to see hybrid RT approaches for the foreseeable future.