What is distributed ray tracing?
Distributed ray tracing is not ray tracing on a distributed system. Distributed ray tracing is a ray tracing method based on randomly distributed oversampling to reduce aliasing artifacts in rendered images. Traditional ray tracing systems suffer from aliasing artifacts. The term aliasing in computer graphics is loosely defined. It can mean almost anything unwanted in the rendered image. Typically aliasing is used to describe jagged edges. In the real world things are not quite as perfect as in a computer generated world – edges and boundaries are not as sharp, reflections are not as perfect, and things can be in and out of focus. If a renderer is being used to approximate reality then these things must be taken into account. Distributed ray tracing uses oversampling to reduce aliasing artifacts. Oversampling is a process where instead of sampling a single value, multiple samples are taken and averaged together. The location of where the sample is taken is varied slightly so that the r
