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

Hardware encoding

[BWJones]

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?

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.

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.

Just annonced

[Prophetic_Truth]

3D Realms upon learning of this new technology has decided to push back "Duke Nukem Forver" until the engine rewrite is completed.

What I would like to see

[narcolepticjim]

Is the Beowulf movie rendered with a cluster of these.

Impossible!

[menace3society]

The FPGA is clocked at 90 MHz and is 3-5 times faster in raytracing then a Pentium4 CPU with 30 times more MHz.

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!

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.

Do you know what an FPGA is?

[fireboy1919]

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.

Anti-Planet

[KalvinB]

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.

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... :-)