There’s an old adage about computer programs endlessly expanding to gobble up every resource as computers improve. Nowhere is it more obvious than in gaming. Textures you’ll never use, translations included in the default download for no good reason, the same files duplicated many times over because it gives a slight improvement to load times on consoles, delta patches using up an entire CPU core and taking longer than simply redownloading the whole game, ten minutes spent compiling thousands of bespoke shaders on startup…

Ugh, shader compilation is the worst since it can ruin an entire planned gaming session. As annoying and performance-crippling as it is in its early stages, I can’t wait for ray tracing to become the default (ironic since it’s Wirth’s Law’s current reigning champion). Modern computer graphics are built on hacks upon hacks upon hacks. Ray tracing, by virtue of acting how light actually acts, cuts the Gordian Knot and vastly simplifies things. Hopefully it’ll help do away with the multitude of shaders used to imitate perfect lighting through imperfect means and we can just simply run our games again.