What is Reddit's opinion of YafaRay?

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Nice piece, I like it. As a tip, try using Yafaray or Lux Render to externally render your works, it'll remove a lot more of the caustic noise that Blender Render leaves behind.

Yeah, that's basically what it is. A 3d render without any textures or colors that looks like clay, it's a term used in 3d modeling. Some more info here

Ray tracing is a rendering technique that attempts to accurately physically simulate the way light behaves in the real world, rather than using cheap approximations as all current 3D games do. It's mostly used for animation and special effects for film, because it is far too slow to be interactive for all but the simplest applications. Because it's so accurate though, very realistic results can be achieved which are hard to replicate otherwise.

yafaray! http://www.yafaray.org/donate/donors The best biased render open source has. I looked up on luxrender but they do not seem to have even a donate page.

If you have used anything in open source 3d, you probably know why yafaray deserves.

Not sure, perhaps "Radar Station model", as there are no textures or shading. I'm sure there's a term for this, just don't know what.

Low poly is a relative term, but to me it's when the mesh's faces are distinguishable, or when you can't bring the poly count any lower without deforming the intended look. Something like this

Edit: I think it's called a clay render. http://www.yafaray.org/documentation/tutorials/clayrender

They do have some sort of software based ray tracing solution. That isn't necessarily new, Yafaray has had software based ray tracing for decades, but making it happen in "real time" is innovative. I think Crytek is limiting it to lighting and shadows, but if you want to know more I suggest this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efOR92n9mms

Credit where it is due, I've heard that it gives decent results with the Neon Noir demo they released. But, being a demo created by CryTek it obviously is biased to work in ways they know. Until we get some other benchmarks or tests it may be too early to tell.

And with hardware ray tracing looking to become standard in the next generation of cards, software solutions might be on borrowed time.

Cycles definitely did not exist back then. I feel like this was earlier than 2005; it feels very 2000-ish. I actually had the privilege (curse?) of getting to use that version, when I first got started. (Didn't touch Blender again for years.) You're dealing with a very, very early version of Blender Classic rendering engine, meant to run on PCs that have a tiny fraction of the resources ours have today.

Yafaray was a good idea that was eventually replaced by an even better one. It stood for Yet Another Free Ray Tracer. It's still technically around, but Cycles kind of edged it out, mostly on account of how freakin' awesome Cycles is. (As of 2.8, it's apparently also edged out Blender Internal). It's still around, if you want to play with it with a modern Blender version.

It's late and I admit I haven't had time to watch more than about eight minutes of it here-and-there, but thanks for the time trip!

Oh, I didn't expect it was so limited, that sucks.

Check out this, it's for Yafaray, but the lighting methods are similar for both engines! http://www.yafaray.org/documentation/userguide/lightingmethods