Add Another Core for Faster Graphics

Dzonatas writes "Need a reason for extra cores inside your box? How about faster graphics. Unlike traditional faster GPUs, raytraced graphics scale with extra cores. Brett Thomas writes in his article Parallel Worlds on Bit-Tech, 'But rather than working on that advancement, most of the commercial graphics industry has been intent on pushing raster-based graphics as far as they could go. Research has been slow in raytracing, whereas raster graphic research has continued to be milked for every approximate drop it closely resembles being worth. Of course, it is to be expected that current technology be pushed, and it was a bit of a pipe dream to think that the whole industry should redesign itself over raytracing.' A report by Intel about Ray Tracing shows that a single P4 3.2Ghz is capable of 100 million raysegs, which gives a comfortable 30fps. Intel further states 450 million raysegs is when it gets 'interesting.' Also, quad cores are dated to be available around the turn of the year. Would octacores bring us dual screen or separate right/left real-time raytraced 3D?"

Comments

hm...

[Facegarden]

My apple only has one core... -Taylor DISCPLAIMER - By apple i mean a piece of fruit grown from a tree, often referred to as an apple tree. I do not own an Apple computer, and am not referring to one in this post. I simply wanted everyone to know that my fruit is relatively normal in regard to the number of cores it contains. Also, it is not very good at raytracing, so maybe the talk of multiple cores really is better for that...

Another one

[gr8_phk]

I did RTchess a few years back (a link would kill my friends server). The core RT code has been pulled into a library and improved significantly since then. I was actually meaning to write an artice making the same point as the one in the summary. Multi-core will make realtime ray tracing common in a five years, and then there will be no use for the GPU. Why rasterize when you can ray trace instead? Ray tracing scales exceptionally well with polygon count (log n). Why add a second chip? Not to mention the geometry needs to be present in the CPU anyway when you do physics. Why maintain all the geometry data in 2 places?

The Intel guy has some funny stats about ray-somethings per second. Intersection tests are irrelevant. Generated rays per second is too. There is already a "Benchmark for Animated Ray Tracing" called BART. Frame rates on those animations are much more important. Unfortunately I haven't even had time to patch that code together with mine to get numbers. It's down there on the to-do list. Is Intel hiring? If someone could pay me to work on it, things would come together quickly.