Rendering techniques — Rasterization vs Ray Tracing vs Path Tracing

Rendering is a technique by which you can get a computer to generate images. But there are different rendering algorithms which have been developed over time and improvements to our graphics card. Today we are going to be talking about three of these algorithms —

Rasterization

Use Case: View-port rendering

The basic of rasterization is converting polygons — mainly triangles into pixel in an image. This process of converting vertices of a triangle in 3D into 2D pixels in an image is rasterization in a nutshell. But to achieve this it is accompanies by Z-Buffer to identify the depth of these polygons, to know what should be the pixel color, identifying which polygon lie before another polygon — Hidden Surface Determination.

Rasterization is parallelizes strongly and runs super fast on GPUs. This accompanied with shading algorithms is what makes games run super fast.

Ray Tracing

Use Case: Games and Movies

While rasterization is great for producing the initial image of where each object in a scene is and how they project onto an image. It suffers from realistic effects like — shadows, reflections and refractions. This was now possible by shooting a ray of light from each pixel in an image and tracing it through the scene to see if the light(after multiple bounces) and final bounce would be to each light source in the scene. With this…