Before going any further let’s answer the question “Why hybrid rendering?”. In a typical rasterization based rendering pipeline, certain effects such as Global Illumination, Reflections and Soft Shadows have to be approximated using either screen space techniques, offline baking or other approaches which typically lead to less-than-believable results in many cases. A fully ray traced renderer on the other hand would be able to model these real-life phenomena much more realistically, although at a heavy performance hit.

Hybrid Rendering is simply the best of both worlds; meaning that we’re enhancing a Rasterization based pipeline by bolting on a bunch of Ray Traced effects that would otherwise have to be done using approximations or hacks.