Over halfway into the semester we've starting touching on subjects that I can't really wrap my head around, so this week I did some extra research on ray tracing and radiosity, and I'm going to compare the two. After I might look for some games with each style of lighting and see how they compare.
http://www.ultrashock.com/forum/viewthread/54289/
This forum thread helped distinguish the differences between the two and summarize how each method works.
The main difference is that ray tracing is dependant on the camera position, while radiosity works fine with any arbitrary camera in the scene. This means that any significant change in the camera's position will result in all the rays needing to be re-calculated again which is a relatively costly operation. Ray tracing sends the rays out of the camera and they bounce around a certain number of times before they are gone.
Radiosity can be considered an extension of ray tracing, in that they can both be used to make a scene look very good. It is calculated from the actual light sources, and the diffuse reflections of the light in the geometry of the scene. Calculating radiosity is very processor intensive but can produce more realistic results, and can be pre-calculated if the scene's light sources do not move.
An additional advantage of radiosity is that it can simulate colour bleeding from one surface to another. Since the calculations for radiosity only need to be done once, static scenes can take a lot less processing overall because you can freely move a camera around the scene after the calculations are performed. To get the best result, a combination of both methods will work but the best, but be the most taxing to compute.
http://www.gametrailers.com/user-movie/raytracing-vs-radiosity-tech/182176
This video demonstrates the major differences the two methods can produce.
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