Computer Graphics: Rasterisation and Ray Tracing

Every renderer answers one question first: at this pixel, which surface is visible? There are two ways to answer it, and almost everything else about a graphics system follows from which one it picked. This path builds the transform chain, then rasterisation as a distributed sort with a depth buffer, then ray tracing as a search through a spatial hierarchy. The last lesson explains why the two coexist, and lets you predict which effects will be cheap, which will be faked, and what the artefacts will look like.