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temple  ·  4320 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: John Carmack on Raytracing

We use a lot of software rendering (Mesa OpenGL or Manta raytracer) - and for our purposes, large models with more primitives than screen pixels - raytracing is faster (for us) for the O(pixels) rather than O(primitives). Plus, the multicore CPU handles large models better than a GPU.

Of course, there are lots of caveats and different use cases (gaming is totally different from our needs). For example, we still use a lot of Mesa OpenGL anyways, just because it's easier to use most of the time than a raytracer.