Amiga

Ray tracing is not a new thing. But what was done on the Amiga 30 years ago is quite different from what people talk about today. We're talking about real time ray tracing - that is technically challenging and requires computational resource every millisecond orders above what was available in an Amiga.

As Isaac Newton (and others before him) put it - we're standing in the shoulders of giants. In 30 years may lament that people forget what was happening in 2023 when they look at the technology of the day.

!remindme 30 years

Oh wait, this isn't Reddit.

we remember it taking multiple hours to generate a single frame with a handful of objects. it was awesome.

I'd argue that every amiga user remembers. Also multitasking that worked. Wysiwyg for far less cost in publishing and if course genlock.

There’s a huge difference between real-time ray-tracing and playing back ray-tracing. The fact that the whole Juggler demo was created and pre-rendered fully on an Amiga was impressive for sure, but that’s not what we mean today when we talk about ray-tracing.

It should be noted that the Juggler animation was a pre-rendered loop, and wasn’t real-time raytracing.

What can be done in real time today took hours on the Amiga back in the day.

I always like to imagine an alternate reality where the Amiga won the personal computer wars of the early 90s and it survived to this day. Now imagine the Amiga OS with technology that is available today (super fast CPUs, tons of RAM, SSDs, etc).

And I bet playing battlefield at 160x120 would actually make it fun!

I remember. It took 14 hours to make one still image at 640x400.