You’re giving Musk too much credit here.

He bought Twitter because a) he’s addicted to it, and b) he rushed into a buying agreement he didn’t get his lawyers to vet properly (probably due to his massively inflated “I understand more than anyone else” ego).

He wanted to back out of it, but faced a lawsuit that he was almost certainly going to lose, so had no choice but to go through with the sale. The lawsuit happened because the shareholders at the time realized the company was worth nowhere close to the inflated $44 billion he offered for it, so they weren’t going to back down either.

Everything else that happened after the sale is a result of a man-child feeding his addiction and recuperate from the dumb deal he was legally forced to uphold.

I’m not a graphics engineer so I only have cursory knowledge of the topic.

The biggest benefits that ray tracing brings is the accuracy of lighting your scenes and being able to forego the “tricks” that you mentioned. These are almost always going to be screen-space lighting techniques and effects e.g. reflections (SSR) and ambient occlusion (SSAO).

Unfortunately, the bad news is that you’d still need to understand the 3D math and shader knowledge regardless of whether you can take advantage of ray tracing or not. The good news is there are numerous game engines and resources out there to help!

Hope you make something cool from the hobby!

Game devs are apathetic to ray tracing.

Traditional rasterization will never go away in our lifetime because ray tracing hardware will never advance broadly enough to replace it.

Ray tracing also doesn’t replace the work needed to achieve the desired atmosphere through lighting and fixing performance related issues - which is most of the work.

The games that do support it right now are primarily using it as a marketing tool, and developers are often paid by Nvidia or AMD to spend the time and resources to implement it.

The most broadly successful games are ones that run on the widest variety of hardware to gain the largest reachable audience. Given that Nvidia is pretty much the only competent ray tracing solution for hardware, that market is extremely small compared to the industry at large.

The technology in its current state is not an exciting prospect because it simply means devs have to spend more time implementing it on top of everything else that already needs to be done - purely because the publisher/studio took Nvidia’s money so they could slap the RTX label on the game.

Try and visit one of the underground city tours while you’re there: https://www.beneath-the-streets.com/ http://www.undergroundtour.com/

The first link is the newer tour company, which I haven’t tried myself, but I hear it’s the better experience.

Either way, it’s worth doing it at least once!

“Forever Pay For Your Mouse”

Conversely, I’ve only ever seen “make do” used.

“Make due” would make sense to me in the context where debt is a factor, for example, “make due on rent”.

It doesn’t make sense when you apply that meaning to how the sentence was written in this article.

While writing this angry comment, did you stop to consider that maybe they did their job right and you’re wrong?

https://www.grammar.com/make_do_vs._make_due

Unless you’re living in the early 1900s, “make do” is correct for today’s English.