Left: a top-down scene with every ray drawn as it travels — hit point, normal, shadow ray, and the reflections that follow. Right: the strip of pixels those rays produced. The image is literally what the rays found.
Drag the eye or the light. Hover a ray — or a pixel in the image — to print its whole path.
What to notice. Max bounces 0 is a rasterizer's worth of information: colour and direct light, nothing else. Each extra bounce doubles the drawing and shows you a mirror sphere reflecting a wall reflecting another sphere — the recursion is the feature. Then switch sampling: one ray per pixel gives a crisp but hard-edged image, jittered multi-sampling softens the shadow edges and antialiases the pixel boundaries, and at low sample counts you can watch Monte Carlo noise crawl. Four times the rays for half the grain.
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