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."
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.