Not only is ray tracing the future of rendering, it's by far the best way to learn basic graphics programming theory, in 100% your own tiny code.
I've literally taught a 12 year old this way from absolute scratch, and have been teaching it this way for over 20 years now; it's a bajillion times more upfront complexity to do a rasterisation engine from scratch, so in practice almost nobody does this, and we're back to using someone else's code / silicon to draw your pixels.
All this is quite apart from the massive recent development of hardware ray tracing. Eventually your OpenGL driver will be emulating rasterisation on modern ray tracing hardware, because there's just no getting around the fundamental need for ray tracing to make progress in CG. All credit to Nvidia for going in big on ray tracing, to the point where many young people apparently think they invented it, RTX On etc..
It's in my opinion ridiculous for an article that purports to talk about GP in general to have exactly zero mentions of ray tracing, and nonzero usage of the phrase "full stack".
Raytracing is one of those promised techniques that has always been "the future", just like fusion power. The actual future will most likely be various hybrid solutions that (among other things) also make use of the raytracing support in modern GPUs. The triangle rasterizer most likely won't go away, it's a too obvious optimization method, it will just be augmented with other specialized hardware units (like texture sampling and raytracing).
Hi floh, big fan! :) I agree, RT won't fully displace rasterisation, but the balance of rasterisation versus RT silicon usage will definitely shift over time, and at some point you have enough power for "legacy" rasterisation rendering via RT that it becomes not worth it to include in top end HW.
It's also possible that with high enough pixel density (e.g. 4K 27-32") and a bit of assistance from the tensor units, you can get better performance vs quality through non-uniform/irregular subsampling; a more extreme example of this is foveated rendering[0]. Something like an extension to current DLSS, more in the direction of compressed sensing[1].
I've literally taught a 12 year old this way from absolute scratch, and have been teaching it this way for over 20 years now; it's a bajillion times more upfront complexity to do a rasterisation engine from scratch, so in practice almost nobody does this, and we're back to using someone else's code / silicon to draw your pixels.
All this is quite apart from the massive recent development of hardware ray tracing. Eventually your OpenGL driver will be emulating rasterisation on modern ray tracing hardware, because there's just no getting around the fundamental need for ray tracing to make progress in CG. All credit to Nvidia for going in big on ray tracing, to the point where many young people apparently think they invented it, RTX On etc..
It's in my opinion ridiculous for an article that purports to talk about GP in general to have exactly zero mentions of ray tracing, and nonzero usage of the phrase "full stack".