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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. Re:FSAA? by Guspaz · · Score: 1, Troll

    But they'd be using supersampled AA... if they're doing true FSAA on every pixel, then the slowdown would be 4x.

    They could be rendering it at nearly 1280x1024 at the same speed without AA... I'd take that over 512x512.

    I've seen "games" that use realtime raytracing on ONE computer. If they need 20 computers to do the same thing, I have to wonder. Is their program just unoptimized/poorly coded? Or have they turned on many questionable quality gimmicks?

  2. Re:Help? by kusanagi374 · · Score: 0, Troll

    Dumb it down? This is /.!

    Let me put it this way: it's geek stuff, and there's nothing interesting to see here. Move along.