Slashdot Mirror
3D Raytracing Chip Shown at CeBIT
An anonymous reader submits "As noted at heise.de Saarland University is showing a prototype of a 3D Raytracing Card at CeBIT2005. The FPGA is clocked at 90 MHz and is 3-5 times faster in raytracing then a Pentium4 CPU with 30 times more MHz.
Besides game engines using raytracing there was a scene of a Boeing with 350 million polygons rendered in realtime."
FPGA is clocked at 90 MHz and is 3-5 times faster in raytracing then a Pentium4 CPU with 30 times more MHz.
I am really not surprised at the performance as most anytime you build code into hardware, it is significantly faster. For instance, I used to have a Radius 4 DSP Photoshop accelerator card in my old 68030 based Mac IIci I bought in 1990 that would run Photoshop filters significantly faster than even my much later PowerPC based PowerMac 8500 purchased in 1996 with faster hard drives and more memory.
The same sorts of benefits can be seen in vector math for optimizations that have been built into the G4 and G5 chips with Altivec.
So, the question is: Can these guys get ATI or nVidia to buy their chip?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
For a second there, I thought I hit my head, and I had gone back to the early 90's!
Huh, what is this, a p0rn chip?
Does horny nerds and geeks need any more encouragement like this??
[anonymity...check.]
In other news The Miskatonic University is showing a prototype of a 3D Raytracing Card at CeBIT2005.
The FPGA is clocked at 666 MHz and is 3.5 billion times faster in raytracing then a 80486 CPU.
Besides game engines using raytracing there was a scene of Cthulhu awakening in 350 trillion polygons rendered in realtime.
i.e. Vaporware
So apparently they should have invested their efforts in a web serving chip.
3D Realms upon learning of this new technology has decided to push back "Duke Nukem Forver" until the engine rewrite is completed.
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
Is the Beowulf movie rendered with a cluster of these.
ray tracing will *so* usher in a new era of realtime graphics when we can do something like 10-50m intersections per second.
it's amazing to me that nvidia have ignored this up until now, their existing simd architecture and memory subsystems can be easily adapted...
all we need now is consumer push!
90mHz chip that can raytrace far more efficiently than a p4... I want to overclock this thing SO bad!
Quoted for redundancy.
That's ridiculous. Everyone on slashdot surely knows by now that the only reliable way to compare processor speeds across architecures is to compare clock speed!
of the avi clips!!!
Is the SU driver open source? Because it would be fun to see people hacking it to send general purpose netlists to the FPGA, and harnessing it for other HW-accelerated tasks. Maybe loading up all the PCI slots with those boards, pooling the GFLOPS, and tapping them for graphics when needed - leaving the rest for computation.
--
make install -not war
How cheap is it?
350m polygons is god damned amazing. I'm sure the kids at Havok will find good ways to implement this, and I'm sure Abit, Biostar, etc will too. I wonder how long it will take for them to make a PCI card you can put in as a graphics-card-booster... or maybe even USB? This technology is extremely exciting. It would definitely lessen the load off of g-cards, and drastically improve the framerate.
... can it render the FF8 ballroom dance scene in realtime?
On the Ray Traced Quake 3 Website it says that runs faster with more computers (about 20 fps@36 GHz in 512x512 with 4xFSAA)
Assuming that is correct,a normal chip can render Ray Traced Quake 3 like graphics at 2 to 3 fps on a 4GHZ machine which means the Ray Tracing Chip could do it at 6 to 9 fps. This might be real-time for alot of research, but when it comes to games anything less then 15 fps is a joke. I'll be interested when they can hit 30 fps, with more graphics complexity then Quake 3.
mnewberg.com
Hooray for consumerism! Where's the boarding platform again?
of tech addicts typing 'drool' into their keyboards
Hopefully, this will help FPGAs to get some much-needed exposure. Their potential is obvious to me, as I think it must be to anyone who's been shown some of what they can do. (For example, this wiki article mentions that current FPGAs can achieve speedups of 100-1000 times over RISC CPUs in many applications.)
Every time I hear about the latest beast of a GPU from ATI or NVidia, I can't help thinking what a waste all those transistors are for anything other than gaming, and maybe a couple other applications. We should be putting those resources into an array of runtime-programmable FPGAs! Your computer could reconfigure itself at the hardware level for specific tasks -- one moment a dedicated game console, the next a scientific workstation, etc.
Lest I get too breathless here, does anyone care to inject some reality into this? Are there technological reasons why FPGAs haven't burst into the mainstream yet, or is it something else? Have I misunderstood their potential entirely?
This is great! I do work with an animation company, and a couple of these bad boys would seriously speed up our render times. The last video our lead artist did had to be rendered below 720x480 because we didn't have six months or a cluster of G5's. We've also been looking at buying time on IBM's supercomputers, but this might end up being cheaper in the long run.
After all, I am strangely colored.
It's rather pretty in a European countryside kind of way - hills with wine grapes on them, big rivers with boats cruising up and down, and big vegetable gardens everywhere (Germans sure love their vegetable patches) - though I doubt it's the kind of place too many international tourists visit. Not the kind of place you'd expect cutting-edge graphics research either; but then, you find all manner of interesting research in all manner of places. Even Melbourne, Australia :)
Hi to any residents of Saarland reading this - are they holding the German round of the World Rally Championship there this year?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Call me a kid, but this amazing technology appears and all i can think is how cool would it be to see enemies coming behind you reflected in a sphere...
Too bad there's no video - but then again, the poor server is doing bad enough as it is.
A Boeing rocket, aircraft, missile, spacecraft or what?
Would you care to enlighten me as to what exactly ray tracing brings to the table, above and beyond what we already get from a state of the art GPU?
Only thing I can think of is that ray tracing would
allow us to replace complicated hacks for shadows
and reflections with a more natural implementation, but I can't imagine how this will usher in a new era of gaming.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
Unfortunately the price is an order of magnitude (or two.. or three) too high for FPGAs to really be a consumer tech. The issue I think is an ASIC costs so little in volume, rather than spend all the money on an FPGA design that might be obsoleted next year anyway - a vendor is more likely to commit a design to silicon and then sell that.
:-) ) if you're interested in this - there is open source hardware out there, some really good designs at that.
There's also the speed issue - I've spent DAYS of CPU time to get a design syntheized from VHDL for a moderately complicated IC built up from available cores.
Factor in optimizing floorplans and the like, and you're talking about serious time commitments to optimize the hardware.
It works; I've been paid to do it in the past; but it's not something I can see in the consumer market for the time being.
An exciting hybrid is intersting though, putting silicon CPU cores on the same die with an FPGA. They've been around for awhile, and I haven't done any FPGA projects in ~18 months - but I haven't seen any real movement outside of areas where FPGAs are already popular.
See Open Cores (no, not sores..
..don't panic
While it's certainly not enough to start playing games, it's a heck of a lot closer than I thought was possible. And there's a lot of tweaking that could be done to speed the process up with present technology. An FPGA is the integrated circuit equivalent of a stack of lego. It makes it possible to build custom hardware without forking out for a custom chip; they are however much slower than such a custom-built. I expect if Nvidia decided to make their next-generation chip a raytracer they could get your 30fps. They won't do that for a while yet though - 512x512 is a long way off the resolution gamers currently play in.
But this is interesting, even though it's not practical yet, because it puts the idea on the table that, in the not too distant future, real-time raytracing might well be a possibility. From here, the big graphics-chip makers can start seriously thinking about it, and, maybe about 5 years from now the first hardware raytracers will begin to appear in 3D graphics cards.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You're to be describing this as if it's some kind of custom hardware with many limitations.
This could not be further from the truth. FPGAs are more flexible than any of their counterparts. FPGA stands for "field programmable gate array," and are basically a matrix of memory elements (at the very least latches) connected to gates that configured to be a particular type of gate via a ROM or something similar.
It's kind of like a chip emulator written in hardware. You may be wondering why we don't use these all the time. First, they're a lot more expensive, bigger, and more power consuming than their one-chip cousins. Second (as if that isn't really enough), they're usually 2-5 times slower than the same logic on a custom chip.
So the big question is why should we use them? What improvements can they give that normal chips can't?
The big gain is when you want to optimize the hardware for a specific application and be able to change it. These were used in high end digital video cards to be able to handle whatever kind of signal is actually output by whatever kind of camera you've got (I can only assume this is still the case, but I stopped keeping track about 2000).
I don't know if the people who wrote this thing take advantage of this idea within their design, but it's a possibility.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
FPGAs speed up processing using dedicated logic instead of compiled code. Old News.
Their server also runs on a 90MHz processor
wow, hard to believe how far we've come in so little time..... from two "paddles" and a "ball" on a 10 by 10 inch screen......too a 350 million polygon superjet.
"The beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bars" - Johnny Cash
Open source hardware would be awesome.
I believe a previous slashdot mentioned that cray was doing something similar with FPGA's on their new systems.
Working with FPGAs, I was quite curious to find out what kind of FPGA they are using - both Xilinx and Altera have some advanced hard functions (such as Multiply Accumulate functions, Block RAM, etc) that seem like they could have a huge impact on the abilities of this board. Unfortunately, after browsing through the links, I had no luck in finding any information about what FPGA they are using. Was anyone able to find this out? Even looking at the pictures of the board, it only shows the bottom side of the board, so it is impossible to see the chip markings!
First Falcon-1 to orbit, then Falcon-9. Then I can die a happy man.
Are you sure the Boeing thing was raytracing 350 million polygons? Or just traditional raster pipeline rendering?
See, the reason I ask is, you generally get away from raytracing polygons and raytrace against the actual nurbs or other mathematical surface definitions. That's the point. You don't feed it to simple scan-and-fill raster pipelines.
[
Wow it rendered the entire Boeing company?! Far out.
"But this is interesting, even though it's not practical yet, because it puts the idea on the table that, in the not too distant future, real-time raytracing might well be a possibility. From here, the big graphics-chip makers can start seriously thinking about it, and, maybe about 5 years from now the first hardware raytracers will begin to appear in 3D graphics cards."
And the API will be...POVRAY!!
Wake me up when they introduce a 3D Radiosity Chip.
Anti-Planet Screenshots. Anti-Planet is a FPS rendered entirely using ray tracing. It requires an SSE compatible processor (PIII and above. AMD only recently implemented SSE in their processors). This has been out long before Doom 3 and runs on systems Doom 3 couldn't possibly run on and the graphics tricks it does are just now being put into raster graphics based games.
That, along with Wolf 5k inspired me to start working with software rendering. I think ray tracing will eventually be the way real time graphics are rendered in order to keep upping the bar for realism.
Real Time Software Rendering
I'm working on tutorials covering software rendering topics. The tutorials start by deobfuscating and fully documenting Wolf5K, cover some basic ray tracing and are now going through raster graphics since the concepts used for raster graphics apply for ray tracing as well. I'll be returning to do more advanced ray tracing stuff later. The tutorials also cover an enhanced version of Wolf5K written in C++ that is true color and has no texture size limitations.
Work Safe Porn
"Hooray for consumerism! Where's the boarding platform again?"
Funny the relationship between consumers and geeks. So if there were no consumers, would there be any geek gear to play with? What would we all do with ourselves then?
"A Boeing rocket, aircraft, missile, spacecraft or what?"
Employee. What!? You thought it was actually going to be something interesting?
You need about an order of magnitude more transistors to do something with an FPGA than to design a special chip for some task. That makes it an order of magnitude more expensive, too, and consume much more power. And even then, it won't run as fast as an equivalent hard-wired chip.
People build special-purpose chips for the mass market because it's the cheapest way of getting the functionality out.
And as general purpose computational devices, FPGAs are just too hard to program and too inflexible.
I wonder if there are any scientific applications that graphic algorithms can be put to other than graphics? Does anyone know of any cross-over application that would find fast processing of these types of algorithms useful? M*O*N*A*C*O
I was under the impression that real time raytracing was still far from practical. I know that Pixar's Renderman uses a much more efficient algorithm, and it still takes on the order of hours to render a full-format movie frame on beefy hardware (I know that's large, but raytracing should scale fine, and we aren't talking about millions of times more pixels). IIRC they use a raytracer only when they need reflections, and those frames are extremely expensive in terms of CPU time.
Think of it this way... How many programs have you seen written for the 3DFX glide API? So, if you are one of the people who still has a glide card, but it was designed so that it couldn't do OpenGL becuase it used completely different technology, how useful would it be to you?
Glide was a great API. Software writtent to use Glide was often much more impressive with stunning visuals that could only be access by directly using the Glide API. As well, Glide was used to accelerate the openGL API which is the way software drivers were meant to be in the first place; an open hardware-specific API for everyone else to adapt their popular API. This solves the disorder of graphics developers from sitting the long route to stable drivers for openGL and Direct3D; someone, like Microsoft or Mesa3D (to voodoo2 Glide API) would just pick up the API from a vendor and run the trials of translating an construment to use it. Of'course, this could lead to practical design limitations, but it would allow some sort of API to appear from a graphics developer
Woops, did I forgot to remove the "sarcasm" tag all this time? Ok... [/sarcasm]
Go take a look at Manticore design on the icculus.org server and just see how near this articles subjective FPGA design is in likeness.
"Generally, if you think THAN=comparisson, you're okay."
No, your should have used "comparison" here. Here is an entry from dictionary.com:
comparison (km-pr-sn) n.
1.
1. The act of comparing or the process of being compared.
2. A statement or estimate of similarities and differences.
2. The quality of being similar or equivalent; likeness: no comparison between the two books.
3. Grammar. The modification or inflection of an adjective or adverb to denote the positive, comparative, and superlative degrees, as in English, along with the equative degree in certain other languages, such as Irish Gaelic.
Really, it may seem petty, but glaring spelling errors like this are an immediate turn-off. I read comments like this and immediately assume the commentor is a prick.
So? English could be his second or third language. You misspelt "comparison", you clown.
So you rarely read an entire Slashdot comment?
When I read a nitpick such as this I assume that the author is an anal retentive jerk (other expletives would be better here, but I'm trying to be nice).
Here is a mirror to the video.
Kinda like when someone misspells "comparison"?
From its performance in serving large files during a Slashdotting, their website is apparently also served from a single 90 MHz processor.
Beowulfs ? We don't need no stinkin' Beowulfs !
When the magic emotion engine of ps2 was announced, I thought, hmmm are they going to for once try realtime raytracing in hardware or cont with tired old polygon rendering.
;)
Imagine if nvidia threw in an extra 5m transistors for a raytracing option
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Why not just overlook such a simple thing and judge the article by its subject matter? No need to go off on a rant and put some poor person down. =)
Don't you think it's an interesting chip?
Suppose I point out it's "comparison"?
"Really, it may seem petty, but glaring grammatical errors like this are an immediate turn-off. I read stuff like this and immediately assume the author is a nitwit and don't bother reading further."
Could not have said it better myself.
Why not gather up some old crap PCs, 1ghz or 1.8s, build a stack of 10-20 of them ($299 * 10) and install linux/povray on em all or whatever you use.
;)
Hell, even 20 chipped xboxs
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Raytracing scales linearly with processing power, but only logarithmically with scene complexity.
afaik the advantage of raytracing is that you are no longer bound by polys though. you can easily have unbelievably complex scenes with little performance impact vs simple scenes. your bottleneck is no longer polys/sec but now rays/sec.
:-)
and iirc raytracing is a very simple thing to parallelize. given the performance they are getting out of their FPGA prototype, I expect this will scale nicely.
imo raytacing is the obvious future of graphics cards.
as an aside, a lot of game mechanics is dependent on raytraces for detecting collisions. now if you could use a raytracing GPU to handle that as well, you've offloaded yet more work from the CPU...
Looks like they were running thier webserver off one of those cards. *rimshot*
Yeah, melbourne has nothing but tonnes of finance companies , call centres and medical/ lawer companies, no real research , oh and a .au registra.
Sure theres a handfull of gaming companies though to get in that line of work you already have to have been in a team that made a game or 2 or 3 and have a degree (how many degree people know gaming?) I know companies want quick results with no trainups, but comon, if someone already has done 3 games, then they are probably burned out tired from that type of work, get some newbies that are fresh and eager and have no hangups.
The rest are either writing crap games for casino machines or a handfull of defense type jobs that want the utmost of specific experience.
Unless someone has some cool techy jobs give me a call/email (10yr+ exp here itching for some tech inventing) My past efforts will impress you.
experienced in win32/mac/linux , including assem, embedded and end user pro-apps.
Back to hard labour.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
- A nitwit
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
I wonder if they're thinking ahead enough to consider a combination of the new Physx chip with a few of these things on a multicore chip. George Lucas just merged his game and movie production studios, seems to be a real trend.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
It's odd that they think that this is news considering that Advanced Rendering Technology were building 3D ray tracing hardware a decade ago.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
I'm annoyed with 'than'->'then' too. Almost as stupid as 'their'->'thier' that I see too often at /. Here's some more:
Who is John Galt?
As interesting and promising as this is, it is currently useless because it seems to produce low quality renders.
The screenshots on the site all show images that could easily be rendered with much greater quality and efficiancy using shadow maps or stencil shadows and manual matrix transformations with portal rendering for reflections.
When this hardware can render scenes on par with that of a professional software ray tracer in real time, then there will be some serious consumer demand.
http://brandonbloom.name
As an animator, I'm stunned by the possibilites of something like this. But it also segues nicely into the conversation I was just having about a particular Japanese PC game developer, and their graphics engines.
For the last five or so years, Illusion has been making, what I can only describe as 'interactive anime porn'. (Save it, I never said I play them.) Any of you who watch TechTV have probably heard of one of their titles from 2003, 'Sexy Beach 2' (Featured on Xplay, much to everyone's respective amusement/chagrin)
Their graphics engines, while not spectacular in all aspects (Though they are improving), have offered near-cg quality characters... Impressive considering that their target platform is ~1.2ghz machines with a modest gfx card.
The conversation I was having was along the lines of 'Imagine if these guys developed an engine for 3+ ghz machines!'...well, hardware like this certainly ups the ante on that...not to mention computer animation in general.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Polygons don't disapear with raytracing, you just raytrace polygons.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Within the last five years I worked for a company that made 3D rendering chips. The operation that was encoded in hardware was that of testing a ray against a triangle; on the chip produced by my former employer, this operation could be done in parallel something like 16 times, using only one or two clock cycles.
Once this functionality was achieved, there were some contextual architectural decisions to be made about what asic would include these gates. The company decided to implement these gates on a chip that had about 16MB of ram on it and its own execution unit (vaguely like one of the subchips in IBM's upcoming cell architecture, IIUC) and then to put arrays of these independent exec chips on daughter cards.
Many of these decisions were trying to solve the specific problems of raytracing, e.g. how do we get geometry info into the chips efficiently, how can we parallelize the running of shaders so they don't bottleneck things, etc. These problems manifested themselves quite differently than they did for zbuffering hardware, and there were lots of clever-yet-brittle constructs used which could be shown to work in specific cases but which had pot-holes that were hard to predict when scaling or changing the problem/scene at hand.
Rather than selling these chips themselves, the company decided that programming them was hard enough that the company itself would package up the chips into a "rendering appliance", which was essentially a computer running linux with a few of these daughtercards in them. For a software interface to rendering packages, the company chose Renderman. The task then became to translate rendering output from disparate sources (Maya, etc) into renderman expressions, and this was devilishly hard to get right. Each rendering package had to be individually tweaked in emulation, and some companies didn't help out much with info, and even those that did weren't able to supply all the info needed in many cases... my former employer ended up chasing un-spec'd features down ratholes.
The end result was really a disaster. Nothing worked quite right, which was problematic because these chips were marketed not just as fast but as faster drop-in replacements for existing software renderers.
I find it interesting how this entire tsunami of problems snowballed from the initial foundation of how raytracing algorithms (and therefore hardware) are different from zbuffering.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
The PURE card has been able to do this and a lot more
link
Not sure why this other card is something new?
DUH!
But depending on the actual graphics output, not too bad for a rendering device. You're better off to compare it to your video card than your desktop CPU. Even on my par 3Ghz machine though raytracing can be dog slow and certainly not near realtime.
I can't comment too much since we're suffering from the slashdot effect (can RTFA but the pics aren't loading), but depending on chip size one could imagine this being very useful on a handheld device or something similar. Perhaps a small integrated graphics tablet would benefit from this?
OK, actually now I've got JPEG's showing the renders, quality looks decent but as far as speed I'd like to see it in real action for realtime rendering.
You've got to be more tolerant, maybe? I just see it as the nature of the site, and the nature of the people posting.
;)
Slashdot is a rapid-fire blog style comment forum. Most people "hear" the words they want to say and type phonetically.
Then very rapidly preview the post (if at all) so they can go flame some poor innocent Mac user.
Grammar or correctly spelled homonyms play a distant second to getting your opinion across...
I wonder if there will ever come a time when it's actually faster to run the OS from the GPU rather than the CPU!
Yes, I know GPUs only suit selective, highly parallel image related operations and slow down with things like sin() and tan(), but they are still getting awfully fast...
Could CELL be programmed to do OpenRT as efficiently as this chip?
I don't know if anyone has mentioned it already, but there is RenderDrive ( http://www.art.co.uk/products.ihtml?page=rdriveove rview ). They are renderman compatible.
So, the question is: Can these guys get ATI or nVidia to buy their chip?
I can't imagine either of these companies ignoring an oportunity like this. The speed at which it renders, and its clock speed make it a perfect cantidate for onboard graphics. AFAIK both companies are making motherboard chipsets and would love to have a silent solution for integrated graphics.
Unfortunately, with all the hype over clock speeds, I can also readily see them pointlessly increasing voltages and bus speeds all in the name of performance. In my mind, the real advantage of these chips is that with a low clock speed like that, they are much easier to keep at reasonable temperatures. Personally, I would love to have high-performance graphics that don't make my computer sound like a vaccuum cleaner, or require elaborate phase-change cooling systems.
"Operating systems suck: you're better off using only the BIOS" --trainsaw.com
scientific workstation?? for who? mass market at 600$ a card? for us, u me, neighbor aerospace engineer maybe but mass market sloow as hell.. :) well those are stillexpencive. because average joe gets their pewter off *ell *paq
rememebr solid state drives? no not flash drives
Dont Judge The situation by the Misfortunate. Goga.
Aside from the "wow" factor, how much does Raytracing really add?
This is one of their raytraced scenes, and this is a shot from the half-year-old Half-Life 2. Notice how while the shadows and lighting in HL2 are burned-in, they're still pretty convincing. This is a shot from a raytraced Quake 3. Notice how it's single-pass raytracing with no reflections and sharp edges... For the full benefit of raytracing you need multipass.
This is an early, leaked shot from Quake 4, a traditionally poly model engine. Traditional racing Games always have great lighting. This is a scene from GTA based on the Q3A raytracing engine, and this is a vaguely similar scene from the game.
With normal mapping coming into it's own and polygon edges mostly a thing of the past, what benefit does raytracing give us? Shadows? It costs us less than one character to draw a drop shadow. Dynamic lighting? There are tricks to doing pseudo dynamic lighting in many circumstances. Generally, though, you don't want too many moving lights in your scene anyway, as the effect is quite nauseating.
The only major benefit that I see with real time raytracing is that it would free up the artists and coders to drop some of the tricks they've been putting in place for the usual lighting stuff.
But for lighting effects, we've got a lot already going, and more coming in soon. I personally can't wait for relative light levels to make their way into more game engines. And normal mapping to become really normal. For many years I had wanted realtime raytracing, but now it seems so unnecessary.
It just seems like raytracing will always be so much more expensive, that the flat-polys-with-tricks models will always look better for the same hardware.
Of course, knowing this industry in 5 years we'll probably have chip boards that have one processor spit out a traditionally drawn 3d polygon scene and another which renders and layers upon that a 2d greyscale light map at a slightly lower resolution using a reduced parallel geometry set or some such. Instead of making things easier, they usually tend to make things harder. Oh well.
Can anyone here with more experience than I explain what raytracing gives you that you couldn't fake more cheaply?
The ______ Agenda
Apparently lots of posters here don't know.
1M = 1000000000m
So tired of seeing mHz.
How does raytracing differ from OpenGL/Direct3D-style 3D?
That's exactly what I was thinking when they announced the PS3 would have 4 cell chips, each with 8 vector processors. Is there anything other than ray tracing that's suitable for such a highly parallel architecture?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Interesting noone has looked into the hardware/software of this thing yet. (maybe I just blatantly overread it)
;)
:)
First thing: I noticed they used / are using JHDL. (java hardware description language) Now am I the only one that goes WTF there ?
I've been working with VHDL and some Virtex chips amongst others, and I only heard about some attempts of C-HDL's (or C-like at least), and they all are in their kinda early steps.
Verilog and VHDL are the way to go. Therefore I ask the question: why the hell do these folks use Java ?
I recognize these people are not amateurs, nor stupid (heh), but I just think its very very awkward.
Granted, it may be the reference implementation, and it may be too complicated, but from the hardware-developer-point-of-view it makes no sense, really.
There are modules, and even cross-compiler compatibility and the whatnot, so please write at least some modules in proper HDL.
Next thing that amazed me: they use one (maybe 2 somewhen) Virtex II 6000-4 units. These are not really up to date any more. So the tech demos they pull, are low-end, in fact.
The particuilar Virtex II unit they use supports up to ~70.000 logic cells. Nowadays, a Virtex 4 unit can hold up to ~200.000. So, talk of parallelism, eh ?
I generally think this is a great approach for improving performance on less silicon. And smart improvements. Enough of simd units aka mmx,sse, 3dnow! and the whatnot. pull one of these cards in, attach loads of bandwidth.
Want to game ? upload ur openRT cores. need video acceleration ? use another core. repeat et al
Powerful is he who overpowers his temptations.
I'm sure Bit Boys Oy! will incorporate this technology into their upcoming videocard design to come out Real Soon Now, now with Bleeding Edge Vaporware Technology (tm).
Could use use both raytracing and rasterisation on the same scene?
for example
first, in parallel;
Rasterizer does the Z-ordering, deciding which polygons are in view of the camera(s) and reflections.
While a raycasting method determines where light is falling based on the light source(s) and reflections.
Then the shader uses those two data sets to color pixels.
Despite all the posts poo-poo-ing this idea, one thing that I find attractive about it is that it should offer a much simpler API than current poly+shading systems.
Honestly, I've tried looking at the OpenGL red/blue books, and granted I'm somewhat lazy, but I see all that messy API and it just turns me off. Then layer on more API for shader extensions. Yecch.
But raytracing is wicked easy - just define your geometry and BAM!
How many accelerated poly/shading 3D renderers can you find on freshmeat? Then add in the popular commercial ones (games). What is it, a few dozen?
Now, think about how many people have used POV-Ray, even just playing around. THOUSANDS, because its a fucking cakewalk.
Put this stuff in hardware, and it puts realtime 3D into the hands of a lot more people! Bring it on, I say.
So many people are dismissing ray tracing out of hand because the screenshots are not as pretty as some from the latest games.
Let me ask you. Why would you expect teams of electrical engineers/mathematicians/programmers be able to produce a prettier image than a team of extremely talented artists.
The job of the artist is to make it look pretty. The job of the guys making this chip is to provide features and to make it go fast.
So it's not fast enough yet. It's a prototype. When it can render decent resolutions at decent framerates then bring in the artists and see what they can do with it.
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
There *is* some nice farmland and forests there, and the rivers in the general vicinity are kind of nice . Luxembourg, across the river, is nicer again :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Raytracing is heavily parallelizable and is an obvious operation to build into a graphics card. It's about time someone managed to do a good job of putting the two together and doing realtime raytracing for games.
- 2 clueless
FPGAs are used for prototyping.
if this thing is really as fast as e.g. the
linked applications on the page state,
e.g. oasen etc - then this will be a killer
once done in raw asic.
make jokes about something you know.
(not involved in the project, but hardware designer.)
Take a look at StarBridge Systems, who have been advocating this approach for years. When they first came out (with claims of 100-1000 fold performance improvement of vector supercomputers for certain applications at 1/10 the price) they were the vaporware of the high-performance computing industry. I didn't believe in it either, but slowly we're all coming around.
ART VPS Ltd have been doing PCI raytracing cards for a couple of years now. I work at a post production facility and we were evaluating them two years ago. The cards are quite neat and the software takes RenderMan files as input. There were some things they were very good at - refraction, motion blurred shadows and the like that 'just worked' when compared to RenderMan. However, they didn't support RiCurve primitives or some of the RiProcedural stuff at the time (IIRC) which were were using heavily, so they turned out not to be practical for us although it's quite possible they've fixed that now. Neat stuff.
or, for anyone with a calculator.
FPGA is clocked at 90 MHz is aprozimatly as fast as a Pentium4 1GHz.
Given you can buy 4Ghz P5's off the shelf, who's going to be buying this chip.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
We had this debate here at my work last year. One guy wanted to solve a problem with DSP chips. He showed that he could get close to what FPGAs could do, but there was so much DSP arcana involved with parallel instruction sets and setting up the data *just* *so* that no one could really understand it, including the guy who was arguing for it. Lots of hand waving, know what I mean?
The FPGA solution involved VHDL code that a college new hire could whip up.
What you're witnessing here may be language evolution in progress. This seems to happen once in a while.
For instance, take a look at some of the old Shakespeare folios and see for yourself that than was then written then and then than.
So, substituting then for than is more than just simple illiterate stupidity: it is very advanced literate stupidity.
Okay cool now we've got raytracing with FPGA's! But how useful is that to most of the geeks out there? Why don't they use FPGA's to accelerate linux in hardware. Maybe reprogram some of commonly used subroutines. Or does that already exists?
Looking at their pages, but dont see it, yet.. Are they going to release the code for the rest of us to look at?
Pretty impressive when its still in a fpga..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The one Beowulf joke to end them all.
I think that what tells is the end result though. If a device running at 90Mhz could say, output 60Fps of raytraced video, it would be better (for that application) than my current GPU - which does fine at standard GL/D3D graphics but can't render attractive Ray graphics realtime...
You need to buy a new calculator!
Why do you assume that I have not considered the "long view"? The previous post *is* my consideration of the "long view". My argument is not that it's too slow right now; my argument is that it will *always* be slower than polygon rasterization. Perhaps in the future more advanced techniques will be able to be implemented in realtime raytracers, but by that time rasterizers will be implementing even more advanced techniques, staying a generation ahead.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Let's see here...
1) Convert FPGA to ASIC - 2x speed increase. (Guessing here. may be more, may be less.)
2) I could not find out WHICH FPGA they are using. But it should be possible to incorporate between 2x to 10x as many units on an ASIC. Let's assume 6 times as many units. If ATI or nVidia tried, they could certainly do this. Radeons and GeForce chips hae a LOT of transistors.
So far, we have a 12X increase, if my assumptions are correct. But these are ball-park figures. The actual speedup could be 5X or 50X. Without more details, it is impossible to know.
But the point is this: if a big manufacturer (ATI, nVidia, IBM, Motorols) wanted to work on this, it will completely surpass even the fastes CPUs.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
only a factor of ten out.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Microsoft announces today that the entire user interface of the next version of Windows will be a three dimensional raytraced environment. Bill Gates claims that this increases efficiency in the work environment. ...hackers have recently found a ray overflow error that installs a key-logger on IE7.
Grammar and spelling helps to give you credibility.
What *really* annoys me is when some nitwit types "noone".
They probably mean "no one".
It distracts me entirely from what they're trying to say and makes me think of one of the Monkees.
...some people are really taking their POV-Ray interest way too far.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
One thing I haven't heard people bring up is the limitations of the "look" of raytracing. In real time graphics right now, we are pretty stuck using the Blinn-Phong lighting model, which can be best summed up in the words of Red vs Blue: "We're in the future now. Everything is very shiny." Raytracing is, generally, the same. It does beautiful reflections and refractions, however diffuse surfaces are not nearly as convincing. I think it's great that we'll be able to run real-time raytracing...but not really that great. I think it's a lot of hardware work for almost no value-add to gaming. With the right shader in RenderMan you can make just about anything, so it's not like raytracing is useless, but I don't see this technology ever going anywhere. Just my opinion.
I'm sure it is WELL too far into the development of the next generation of consoles, but a true chip built with this technology would need a lot of speed improvement to look VERY good at 720p or 1080i and would easily walk all over anything the competitors could do until they implemented the same technology.
Lots of good information, I really enjoyed that.
mnewberg.com
Your an arsehole.
To do list for Windows
I've been watching these guys' web site for a while, and it is great that they now have something decent to show for their work!
It's important to realise that going from a prototype to a real marketable product may take a *lot* of effort, particularly in this field. If you don't provide the highest quality and features, you'd have to compete mainly on speed. If you provide all the features and quality needed for rendering movies, you have a very complex product. It's not clear where this project is headed, but it seems to be mainly a research vehicle at the moment.
They say that Programmable shading, Parallel rendering and Global illumination are on their research agenda, so they're probably quite a way from a full-featured rendering system.
At Advanced Rendering Technology, we jumped in at the deep end! We took in over £14m of investors' cash to (try to) create a full-featured hardware ray tracing appliance. The products are still being marketed at http://www.art-render.com/, but the original company ran out of cash and has been liquidated. A brief explanation of what happened is below.
The business was created in March 1995 from the results of my Ph.D work at Cambridge University (UK). The chip, the AR250 was loosely based around the system described in my thesis "Real-time ray tracing on an advanced HDTV framestore", published in 1993 (not available online, but see patent).
The business was built on a shoestring at the start, getting early investment installments of just £50,000 ($75,000 then). With this funding, we set out detailed create proof-of-concept and a full business plan. The plan agreed was to develop and market a rendering appliance, based on:
A) A multi-million transistor graphics processor, comprising ray/object intersection pipeline, programmable shading coprocessor, and microprocessor-based control circuit.
B) Parallel processing accelerator boards with up to 64 processors
C) An embedded Linux system (we used Dec Alpha initially)
D) An efficient and robust RenderMan Shading Language Compiler
E) Rendering/driver software capable of accurate area lighting, motion blur, depth of field, volumetric effects, even for multi-million object scenes and resolution of 6k x 4k or higher.
F) A suite of application plug-in network RenderMan drivers, with support for 3D-Studio Max, Alias|Waverfront, Soft Image, as well as RenderMan direct
G) Throughput of "up to 1000x" existing software solutions on contemporary PC hardware
and once we had done all that lot, we'd shrink it to a single card and in due course move it to a real-time high-end visualisation solution.
Some "experts" said it was actually *impossible* to parallelize ray tracing in the way we had claimed! Others just said it was too ambitious.
Investors were *very* enthusiastic about the project, but demanded unrealistically short timescales with no slack. Process quality, management, testing and documentation went out of the window. They also demanded veto rights over any significant changes to the plan
To stick within the budget, we could only afford to employ one experienced chip designer (increased from the initial plan of nil(!)), and we couldn't have access to a full set of software tools either.
To stick within the schedule, we had to assume the chip would be "right first time", and would be saleable within months of receipt from the fab. The software systems would have to be built concurrently with chip design. There was no time or budget for fixing design issues with the chips. The first prototypes had to go to paying customers.
It became clear in 1996 that we needed access to an additional chip development tool not budgeted for. This led to a six month(!)
I've worked a lot with quite a lot of the current design hardware for real-time games.
whatever you say about the current render hardware speeds or any argument against NOT pushing openRT to its absolute limit to the expense of the current technologies. The point is with this kind of techology designing new and almost visually perfect and perfectly dynamic, becomes such a striaghtforward task. No more huge quantities of files need to be poured over for years to produce large varied environments. I'm sure I've seen somewhere that when this stuff is finished the likes of Doom 3 and Half-life 2's developement time would've been something like 6 months instead of years.
for example, the opensource technology ive currently been designing to simulate water (which unless Ive missed a news announcement doesn't exist in opensource yet) - the water in hl2 wasn't interactive, it was statically designed and so couldn't change depending on what you did. theres an example video below:
ltktbm water video
that video will look photo realistic with openRT, but such quality would require years of work with openGL.
Sounds interesting. Maybe instead of tracing rays to and from lights. How about the objects themselves are giving off varying degrees of light?
It's a shame that you didn't post this earlier, but you could generate a little more interest by posting a journal entry about the events at ART, or even several, as the technology and business side of it are each worth independent focus. It might be worth re-posting your entries after you've aquired enough "karma" and "friends" to know that you actually have an audience.
The ART rendering system was/is excellent technology, especially for its day, and in terms of photorealism, no-one's even come close, especially at the speedups that ARTs rendering system was/is offering. Those were good days for me...
Wikileaks, no DNS
Wolf5k is a raycasting engine, this is diffrent from a ray tracing engine. Early first person view games used ray casting for hidden surface removal because the number of 'rays' cast were limited to the horizontal resolution of the screen. In other words 320 rays for early games like wolf3d. Many older game books have example raycasting engines. The problem was that extending the concept was difficult without loosing the performace. Later BSP trees pretty much removed the whole raycasting method in favor of just culling enough polygons to make a visually workable engine.
Yes, "traditional" ploygon painter engines can be setup to work in quadrants. Hence SLI and similar technologies.
Thats cool, the rendering looks really nice, but it also looks a little '90s because there isn't any texture mapping on the pieces. Better yet, since texture mapping is sort of a hack, what you need are some really high polygon detailed chess pieces with individual rocks on the rook, faces on the pawns, or enough detail that the pieces look like they have been hand carved out of some substance.
Here - just what you're after - people using the GPU for general purpose.
http://gpgpu.org/
Check this out. And if you like what you see and want to do some yourself, my very personal favorite tool: POV
This from 2001 blew the varous parts of my mind involved with detecting CGI artifacts away. Imagine what todays hardware can do...
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e