Wow. Most of this went right over my head but I get excited just from reading about this sort of stuff
I mean I did play with ray tracing to some extend with Wings3D and the POV-Ray and YafaRay ray tracing programs back than and I still use it for some speed modelling. In fact the last time I touched this was this very year and I was so happy that at least YafaRay did Just Work™ on my Fedora Linux PC.
I re-used a scene that I created over a decade ago and while the result had slightly different lightning it isn’t really noticeable after converting and compression of the rendered files.
So yeah people, please do keep this stuff alive, k thanks 😀