While reading the code, I had the feeling that some parts of cycles were built with real-time ray-tracing in mind. Though as far as I understand, the Blender interface doesn’t seem to fully utilise these capabilities.
Anybody has any experience with using cycles as a real-time ray-tracer?
Ive never really used Cycles in a real time sense. At least not on an actual production. The only “Real Time” stuff ive ever done is just optimizing scenes beyond belief so it looks like its a final render in 1 sample. Best achieved with branched sampling.
Now I do render faster than real time on render farms but that doesn’t really count. Ive technically gotten over 300 FPS in Cycles before just not in the view port.
There’s difference between realtime and interactive. Interactive means delivering some feedback within desired output framerate (let’s assume 30FPS), while realtime means delivering actual final image at 30 frames per second.
I’d say Cycles was built mainly with the former in mind, rather than the latter. Eevee is also technically not a realtime renderer, but is a lot closer to one than Cycles.
When it comes to hardware accelerated ray tracing in forms such as nVidia’s RTX (DXR or Vulkan Rays), then Eevee is a lot better candidate to receive it than Cycles.