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Frame from Brigade 3 real-time path tracing Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Brigade 3 real-time path tracing

Sam Lapere (Supergastrocnemius)
Demos
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this demo1 month2014–2019 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Cited as an early proof that real-time path tracing was feasible, years before it reached mainstream games.

A demo of Brigade 3 real-time path tracing at 720p controlled with an Xbox controller. Depth of field, field of view, reflections and shadows can be altered live.

1 recommendations · 3 citations · Demos · intermediate · partly dated

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@ilaksh Feb 2014 Recommends
on HN thread WebGL raytraced eye
Why doesn't GPU hardware do native path tracing now? People (well at least 1 person) is/are using general purpose GPUs to do path tracing at almost real time. If they created GPUs with cores specifically for path tracing then we could have real time path tracing as soon as that was engineered. Whoever made this brigade 3 thing, I wish nvidia or ATI would hire him. [this video]
Near real-time GPU path tracing demo.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@ilaksh Feb 2014 Cites it
on HN thread If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?
Read more
My favorite things right now which I am happy to recommend are ToffeeScript [link] with Node.js and Nimrod [link] . I also think LiveScript is awesome. AngularJS is great. Web Components are better I think though. Docker has redefined devops in my opinion [link] GLSL is very cool and something you can even experiment with in your browser using Three.js etc. I believe that real time ray tracing is going to be a thing within a few years [this video] [link] CoreOS looks very interesting. WebRTC is a technology that could almost make an industry irrelevant. [link] Understanding APIs around bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general seems important. I believe that the internet is eventually going to be switching away from normal named server structures to a content-oriented architecture. [link] There are a lot of ways this category of architecture is actually currently being deployed behind the scenes, for example CDNs or bittorrent. I believe that we are going to start using that type of system more and more and eventually we will lose things like the HTTP layer. This may be combined with some of the technologies related to cryptocurrency. For an example of why we are moving to named data networking, take a look at well.. just about any web application that wants to scale. For example the npm registry. Also consider the issues around privacy with Facebook and the NSA, and the ability for governments to censor or take down web sites or domains. So any technologies that facilitate things lik
Example of real-time ray tracing expected within a few years.
@Geee Jan 2019 Cites it
on HN thread Q2VKPT: Fully path traced Quake 2
It could look way better with more detailed geometry and proper materials. Most of those textures have baked-in lightning and lack normal maps and proper materials, which take away a lot of the effect. Take a look at this video from 2013: [this video]
Earlier real-time path tracing demo with more detailed geometry.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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