What is Raytracing?
In all modern forms of 3D rendering for display on a computer, the goal is to determine the color of every pixel on the screen as fast as possible. Raytracing is simply a method that can be used to do so. Currently, the most common method for rendering realtime 3D graphics is rasterization. There are fundamental differences between the way rasterization and raytracing go about determining pixel color. With rasterization and raytracing, we start with geometry. Triangles to be specific. We have a scene made up of triangles and shader programs are used to determine the color at any given point on every triangle. With a rasterizer, we loop through every triangle and use math to project the triangle onto the screen. This is like taking a 3D scene, and flattening it out. We find out what pixels every triangle overlaps and save the depth values for later when we shade those pixels. We use lighting algorithms, texture maps, and the location of the pixel on the triangle itself to do the shading
