[Zarax]

As both nvidia and AMD (plus Intel next year) now support ray tracing, it might be a good time to start thinking about an implementation in FSO.
It's not exactly a feature request but rather an inquiry about the possible benefit of such rendering approach in the game.

Is there any aspect of the rendering that could give a significant visual improvement?
I would hazard a guess that shadows might be an extremely limited benefit (after all, most of the game plays on a predominantly dark background) but global illumination might be more immersive.

What do you guys think?

[The E]

I think that, while this is an interesting field to experiment with, the first thing that needs to get done before we can even consider starting experiments is for Vulkan support to become functional, and of course, for khronos to finish designing an official raytracing spec for vulkan.

[Galemp]

I cannot fathom how this would be worth the effort to implement or the processing power to activate. You're in SPACE! There's almost nothing to reflect other than the skybox environment which we've been doing for years, and there's almost no reflective surfaces anyway.

[Zarax]

I suspected as much but it was instructive to hear from the experts.
Thank you!