Topic on User talk:Macgovern
This was discussed quite a lot among the staff members and we eventually landed on clarifying the mixed use of the ray tracing
row in the editing guide, as well as add a section on the glossary page about software ray tracing.
There were various reasons why we opted to go this way, but the primary ones ended up being:
a) it is almost impossible for end users to easily tell whether ray tracing is hardware or "software" based,
b) it also does not necessarily matter since even "software" based ray tracing is often superior to classic rasterized lighting effects. Note that "software" is a bit of a misnomer since the effects are still rendered on the GPU, just not on dedicated discrete ray tracing hardware chips.
c) to differentiate between these sort of differences is the whole purpose of our limited
state. Instead of only tracking hardware ray tracing (and losing out on the ability to track software ray tracing), the updated editing guide allows tracking both. true
will be used for hardware ray tracing, while limited
will be used for games which only supports software ray tracing, with an accompanied note.