Article: Article: Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Graphics Study

[SilverWarior]

Give it a few more years still and we'll see Engines + GPU's make the move to true real-time ray-tracing making all of our complicated raster 'short-cuts' and approximations a thing of the past. This is likely to be developed in tandem with voxel based static scenery at first (enabling the same LOD calculations to work on both 'meshes' and 'textures' and lending very well to the ray-tracing process) with the later developments of fully deformable/skinnable dynamic voxel objects.

I don't think that these "complicated raster 'short-cuts' and approximations" as you call them will be the thing of the past any time soon. Why?
Nowadays the GPU's aren't only used for processing graphics but aso for procesing of some other things like physics.
And the main reason why many of todays top notch games still use these raster shot-cuts is to save some GPU performance so that it can be used for physics.
But it doesen't stop with physics. I have read an article about someone trying to use GPU power for processing of compley AI algorithms. And a guy even used GPU power for speach syntesysis.

So while GPU processing power is increasing a lot so does its utilization applications. Meaning that we will still have the ability and probably also the need to use these reaster short-cuts.

As for dynamic deformable voxels. I don't think this concept is realy sound. Deffinitly not as some pepole are imaginening it.
You see the biggest advantage of fixed size voexels is that you can greatly simplify the math when doing things like ray tracing, colisions detection etc. But as soon as you defore soe of these voxels you lose that ability.
It is like comparing the colision detection on fixed sized 2D grid (where you can use simplified math) and some 2D net with different sized and shaped cells (where you can't use any simplified math).

@phibermon If you want to do a more thoural discusion about dynamic voxels with me feel free to contact me though skype. I'll probably be online for the rest of the day.
Feel free to contact me if you might want to dicuss something else instead.

Same thing applies to everyboddy else