ray-tracing
2 free lessons tagged ray-tracing across Computer Science. Each one is a short sequence of focused steps with narration and a five-question quiz at the end — take them in any order, no signup required.
Sort or Search: Why Both Pipelines Survive
The two renderer architectures are not competing implementations of the same idea. One sorts fragments for a single viewpoint, the other searches for a hit along an arbitrary ray. Reading them that way explains which effects are cheap in each, why production renderers combine them, and what a hybrid actually buys.
Ray Tracing and the Cost of Asking Anywhere
Ray tracing takes the opposite loop: for each pixel, find the geometry it hits. That buys visibility queries from any point in any direction, which is what shadows and reflections need. It also costs a scene-wide data structure, and the quality of that structure decides whether the renderer is usable.