Ray-tracing, the simulation of light rays and their interactions with the environment, is the holy grail of computer graphics and can achieve Hollywood-level imagery. The Amiga home computer, despite being capable of ray tracing in the 80s, was left out of the conversation due to hardware limitations. The Amiga played a significant role in visual effects and pioneered software that is still used in the TV and film industry today, but ultimately fell out of favor due to financial struggles and competition from home consoles.

  • Hazdaz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    What can be done in real time today took hours on the Amiga back in the day.

    I always like to imagine an alternate reality where the Amiga won the personal computer wars of the early 90s and it survived to this day. Now imagine the Amiga OS with technology that is available today (super fast CPUs, tons of RAM, SSDs, etc).

    • LucyLastic@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Can be done, you can buy a new PPC based computer and run Amiga OS 4 on it … can’t do an awful lot with it because it doesn’t have a lot of programs, but you can buy one.