Path tracing produces accurate and great looking results. It is a traditional way to produce high quality, realistic, renders. The problem with path tracing is that it is a very demanding process and can take hours or even days to render video.

So real time graphics on the whole use a different process called rasterization. This is much quicker and can render motion in real time. But it is not as accurate as path tracing.

So getting path tracing quality in real time graphics is something that has not been possible. That is until very recently!

Epic games presented a new plugin that enables real time path tracing! This is quite mind blowing. There are some caveats with this, such as that real time path tracing does cut some corners that traditional path tracing doesn’t.

However, for an indepth look into this new technology please see the presentation from Epic games.