As a famous DP once said, the study of life is the study of light.
Confession time: I was scared of math for a large portion of my life. I didn't take calculus till college, and the experience was basically traumatic as it was awful trying to learn it in a setting where the class was over 500 people big. It wasn't until maybe 5+ years ago that I buckled down and taught myself vector calculus, and holy shit.
I don't quite know how to put it into words correctly, but there's like this secret mathematical language that governs the universe. Calculus, the study of change, is the secret to all sorts of advanced mathematics. They teach math incorrectly in America. What we think are "fundamental maths" like addition subtraction, etc, are more like learning individual letters. The most math people get to is algebra or trig, which is kinda like learning how to put together letters to form a word.
By contrast, calculus is like learning how to structure and write paragraphs. Once you understand vectors and forces, once you understand that all numbers are inherently multidimensional, once you understand matricies,
the entire world opens up. I see raytracing cards not as graphics technologies, honestly. I said earlier that it's more like a physics card, but even that's not quite right. It's a
vector calculus tool. It is applicable in
so so many ways. This type of math, which we now have a very powerful consumer tool for, opens up a
LOT of possibilities, not just in games but all over. This is all insanely cool tech.
The math this stuff enables, I'll say it again, unlocks the secrets of the universe.
Anyone who wants to have their minds blown, watch these:
Once you start getting into calculus, you start talking about mathematical concepts which can't be understood in singular moments. They can only be understood when observed through time or change. That's the driving principle behind vector mathematics. A vector doesn't represent a point in space. It represents the transformation from one moment to another. With a mathetmatical language to describe changes like this, you can model and calculate all sorts of very complex things. This all plays back into the hardware that powers this type of raytracing. That's exactly what it's doing. It's giving us an answer -- in this case, the color of the resultant pixel on screen, that can only be understood by examining the change in position of photons over time. You can replace light and photons with any sort of driving force. It's
nuts.