Ummm…ray tracing was invented for CPUs long before GPUs even existed.
Before The Sims, I used to play with this program that was meant for architects designing homes, but 9-year-old me treated it like a game. It had a ray tracing button that when pressed, would render a ray-traced view of the room you were in.
It took at least a couple of minutes on my dad’s Windows 95 PC to render a single frame, and if you moved the camera at all, the view would switch back to raster and you had to re-render the scene all over again. But it was real ray tracing, performed on the CPU, in the 90s.
Nice, now we just need 80 CPUs and we won’t need a GPU anymore!
Perfect! We’d have pretty low utilization on those 80 CPUs, though – if we made them smaller, the power draw would be lower and it would be cheaper. We could then get away with adding more CPUs. It would then make sense to put the array of simple CPUs on its own card, dedicated to graphics processing… wait a minute.
