Editing Ray tracing (graphics) (section)

===Advantages over other rendering methods===
Ray tracing-based rendering's popularity stems from its basis in a realistic simulation of [[Computer graphics lighting|light transport]], as compared to other rendering methods, such as [[rasterisation|rasterization]], which focuses more on the realistic simulation of geometry. Effects such as reflections and [[shadow]]s, which are difficult to simulate using other algorithms, are a natural result of the ray tracing algorithm. The computational independence of each ray makes ray tracing amenable to a basic level of [[parallelization]],<ref>{{cite book |first1=A. |last1=Chalmers |first2=T. |last2=Davis |first3=E. |last3=Reinhard |title=Practical Parallel Rendering |isbn=1-56881-179-9 |publisher=AK Peters |year=2002 }}</ref> but the divergence of ray paths makes high utilization under parallelism quite difficult to achieve in practice.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Aila |first1=Timo |first2=Samulii |last2=Laine |year=2009 |chapter=Understanding the Efficiency of Ray Traversal on GPUs |title=HPG '09: Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics 2009 |pages=145–149 |doi=10.1145/1572769.1572792 |isbn=9781605586038 |s2cid=15392840 }}</ref>