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Quake III Gets Real Time Ray-Tracing Treatment

Posted by simoniker on from the looking-smooth dept.

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."

12 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Does it make full use of GPUs? by reality-bytes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Its a bit hard to tell from the page whether this makes full use of the GPUs per box in the cluster like Chromium

    They do also mention that it can render entirely in software over the network at 20FPS - not bad considering that each fram portion of the data has to pass across presumable 2 machines before it is passed to the display!

    --
    Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
  2. Kinda cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That's pretty nice. Unfortunately most of the effect can be simulated using tricks and still run on a regular computer. Especially with all the stuff you can do on the GPU now.

    They need to soften the shadows also. Either by using tricks or radiosity. Right now it looks kinda meh...

    Interesting effort though.

  3. raytracing downsides? by Ender+Ryan · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Ok, so this is pretty neat. The screenshots look pretty nice, and I'm downloading the video(ISDN, bleh), but what I really find interesting is the mention of a hardware raytracing GPU, and a link to a working prototype.

    So my question is, for those of us who don't know the first thing about 3D graphics, what are the pros and cons of a raytracing GPU, compared to the polygon pushers we currently know and love.

    --
    Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
    1. Re:raytracing downsides? by NoMercy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      20 years, in that time if mores law holds the average processor will be 2^(20/1.5) times more powerful, which is to say 10321x more powerful than today, even if it doesn't hold true, I suspect were more likely to see ray-tracing in 10 years, after all 10 years ago, were talking 1994... we'd only just got Doom from ID, no one had dreamed yet of looking up in a FPS :)

    2. Re:raytracing downsides? by jonadab · · Score: 2, Interesting

      > 20 years, in that time if mores law holds the average processor will be
      > 2^(20/1.5) times more powerful, which is to say 10321x more powerful than today

      Yes, but meanwhile expectations (regarding resolution, object complexity, and so
      on and so forth) also keep going up, as existing game technology develops. It
      is not enough to have the processing power to raytrace something that would
      look very impressive today.

      20 years could be longer than is required, but it's very hard to tell ahead of
      time how long it will be. My point is that the time isn't here yet, though
      experiments like this are interesting anyway of course.

      --
      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
  4. Looks worse to me by Jerf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Is it just me, or did that look much worse than standard Q3?

    Q3 isn't designed, let alone optimized, for raytracing, so that's not a major surprise, but I still expected an improvement, not a downgrade.

    I think a custom demo is called for.

    The tech sure is hella cool, though.

    1. Re:Looks worse to me by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Looks much jerkier as well. In the AVI, the gun seems to jump around way too much.

  5. Re:FSAA? by Guspaz · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Bah, google it. I'm talking about games I saw years ago, I don't memorize the URLs of every page I visit so I will have instant access to it many years down the road.

    A quick google search turned up http://www.realstorm.com/ which is a realtime raytracing engine. A very impressive one might I add. It is able to render at 512x512 in realtime on a single machine, and looks better than Q3RT to boot.

  6. Ray traced games on consoles by Mekabyte · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And some people 10 years ago thought that ray traced games were going to be on LAST generation CONSOLES.

  7. An interisting debate on Real Time Raytracing... by Repran · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... can be found here.

    --

    -- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.

  8. Missings some things by The+Moving+Shadow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Okay i know raytracing provides far more realistic visual representations of a 3D modelled scene than actual scanline polygon rendering. But - and here comes the but - i miss a lot of things in this raytraced Quake movie. All the shadows are really really crisps, one would expect that when light bounces off walls and objects a few times its reflected light would soften those crisps shadows. E.g. it would result in softened gradual shadows.

    I guess they limited the path of the ray they calculated so it bounced only two or three times off an object before they stopped calculating it. (If they stopped after one pass you wouldn't have seen those reflective glass balls like you did, which need multiple passes to look like they do).

    I also miss colour bleeding on the surfaces. E.g. when you have - let's say - a white surface next to a red surface, some of the red will bleed on the white because light coming from the red surface will fall on the white surface and light it in a red hue. You would have seen this with a proper raytracing engine where the light bounces multiple times from an object and where the colour of the light is affected by the colour of the object.

    I think those are the main reasons why the video doesn't look as realistic as i hoped for. (Then again how realistic is walking through a building where they have decorated the place with gruesome wallpaper taken from a horror movie and gigantic brains on mechanic spider legs walk around... ;) )

  9. Re:Radiosity! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Let's make it somewhat more accurate by introducing another variable S, the screen size in pixels.

    Polygonal: O(max(S, N))
    Ray tracing: O(S log N)
    Photons: O(max(S, P) log max(P, N))
    Radiosity: O(max(S, N^2))

    Note that if N ~= S polygons keep linear behaviour while ray tracing becomes linearithmic.