I found a really cool example of just how exponentially ray tracing grows to be Pixar's Monsters University. They had to abandon ray tracing and manually place shadows because even singular frames would start to require impractical amounts of RAM (~96GBs)! Link to article: https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/21/4446606/how-pixar-changed-the-way-light-works-for-monsters-university
I found a really cool example of just how exponentially ray tracing grows to be Pixar's Monsters University. They had to abandon ray tracing and manually place shadows because even singular frames would start to require impractical amounts of RAM (~96GBs)! Link to article: https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/21/4446606/how-pixar-changed-the-way-light-works-for-monsters-university