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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."

2 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.