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Quake III Gets Real Time Ray-Tracing Treatment
Ozh writes "Did you ever wonder what you could do with a cluster of 20 AMD XP 1800s? Some German students and videogame fans did, and their answer has been what they call 'ray-tracing egoshooters', an entirely raytraced game engine which 'runs about 20 fps@36 GHz in 512x512 with 4xFSAA'. The first game to get this treatment is Quake 3 Arena : the screenshots look slightly better than the original 3D engine but the video (56 Mb, 3'19) is quite dramatic."
According to Moore's law, we should get this power in our desktops in about 4 and a half years from now.
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2B1ASK1
Ray tracers tend to look a bit "eerie", for lack of a better word. They tend to leave shadowed areas very dark -- in real life, light will bounce around in corners and things a bit
That's what radiosity is for. Now a realtime radiosity package would be tres amazing.
Yeah, it should --- Its running at 20fps. anything below 60ish and you see jitter and skippiness. Hell I am pretty bad at noticing crap like that. My bottom is around 40fps. OTOH, I have a bud whose eyes are so finicky, anything less than 75-80, and he can see.
Sigs are nice guns
A freind of mine wrote a real time raytracing engine as an assembly demo on an 80386 back in 1993 or so. Doing "real time raytracing" isn't that hard, it's doing it with complex objects, lots of light sources, and high resolution, that becomes a problem. IIRC, his was in 320x240, and was only rendering half the lines on the screen (effectively 160x240), and the scene was just moving through a dullish rocky martian landscape with a setting sun as the only lightsource.
My point being, it's not a great feat to do realtime raytracing, it's just a great feat to harness enough hardware power or come up with enough optimization tricks (without cheating and make it of lesser quality than a real raytrace) to do big nice-looking things with it.
11*43+456^2