Voxel* not vowel...

Thanks for your insight. I didn't know about interpolative vowel modeling before, although I was aware of the first two techniques you mentioned, I thought Ray tracing and the likes of DLSS had made some headway into those frontiers to consider them a matter of time.

Do you think game devs will catch up to the rate of hardware advancement where they will still need to squeeze every last drop of performance?

I feel like there's so many ways to write the same functionality in C++ that it's hard to resist the temptation of thinking "oh I could do it this way instead!" halfway through a feature.