Turner Whitted's 1979–1980 ray-tracing work showed how recursive rays could model mirrors, transparent materials and hard shadows in a unified image-synthesis algorithm.
Microsoft's DXR API and NVIDIA's 2018 Turing/RTX hardware made ray queries a practical part of real-time game rendering, reviving a decades-old algorithm inside hybrid rasterization pipelines.
Physically Based Rendering paired a complete open-source renderer with a textbook, turning graphics theory, implementation and reproducible research into one literate-programming artifact.