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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?
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For a second there, I thought I hit my head, and I had gone back to the early 90's!
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
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!
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.
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make install -not war
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.
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
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.
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
There's a standard model of a Boeing aircraft (777, IIRC) that's used as a something of a test scene in the computer graphics community. It's about 350M triangles (everything down to nuts and bolts, but modified so as not to give any trade secrets away) and over 4GB of data, so it gets used a lot for testing how the performance of an algorithm scales to large datasets.
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.
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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.
[
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
Try http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/MassiveRT/boeing777.h tml when they're no longer being slashdoted.
Here is a mirror to the video.
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 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.
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...
- 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.
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http://houndwire.com
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
If you have a look at the sample pictures they aren't extremely detailed compared to that used by pixar. To get something running near real time at the quality pixar uses you would need hundreds, if not thousands of better and more expensive FPGA's running concurrently to produce a reasonable frame rate. Considering some FPGA's can cost around $1000/piece for the better ones, this could make it too expensive to put together something at the present. While FPGA's are good for designing hardware to handle ray tracing, it would probably be cheaper to design and build a custom chip to do real time ray tracing that would be suitable for commercial use.
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.
Could CELL be programmed to do OpenRT as efficiently as this chip?
CEO
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.
Reconfigurable hardware is rarely enough of a benefit to outweigh the large cost differential between an ASIC and an FPGA.
(I work for an ASIC design team for a living, so yes, I do know what I'm talking about.)
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
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