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."

Comments

Re:Hardware encoding

[ghereheade]

As an FPGA, no. NVIDIA et al would find it to expensive. But if they can roll their Verilog/VHDL code into an ASIC without to much trouble, it might be cost effective enough to catch the gamer and CAD markets. And as a side benefit, an ASIC should potentially run even faster thus giving even more amazing performance. In fact, without knowing what these guys are up to, I'd bet that is in their business plan.

Performance

[MatthewNewberg]

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.

The "Q3RT" screenshots...

[Lisandro]

... are impressive (here and here, for example). They don't look like much and might appear a bit dull but the ammount of details in reflections and such is surprising.
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.

raytracing advantages

[bani]

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... :-)

Re:Hardware encoding

[Rothron the Wise]

Of course, raytracing produces beautiful results compared to the other methods of 3d graphics, but it is MUCH more expensive in terms of CPU cycles on today's CPUs

This may not be true for very long. The complexity of a scene in a traditional polygon renderer like nvidia's chips scales fairly linearly with the number of polygons in view. Not so with raytracers. They have hierarchical structures to test for which group of triagles a ray may intersect and scales more like O(n log n). They also render _only_ viewable pixels, while overdraw is a major hurdle for traditional 3d cards.

What this means is that as scenes get increasingly more complex, there is a crossover point where ray-tracing will overtake traditional rendering, and dedicated raytracing hardware ensures that this happens sooner. If you add this to the fact that raytracing lets you have perfectly smooth non-polygonized objects, perfect reflections and other features not easilly replicated by traditional rendering you'll see the incentive.

A case in point: prman, the renderer used by Pixar is a traditional polygon rasterizer, but Pixar has on occation used BMRT (A renderman compliant ray-tracer) for scenes that require ray-tracing for realism.

Specifically a scene in A bug's life depicting a glass bottle filled with nuts was renedered using BMRT. Flexible and robust realistic reflection and refraction is solely in the domain of ray tracing. What you saw in Half Life was only cheap tricks which would fail miserably in less constrained scenes.

Programer vs. Artist screenshots.

[Lerc]

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.