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Real-time Raytracing For PC Games Almost A Reality
Vigile writes "Real-time raytracing has often been called the pinnacle of computer rendering for games but only recently has it been getting traction in the field. A German student, and now Intel employee, has been working on raytraced versions of the Quake 3 and Quake 4 game engines for years and is now using the power of Intel's development teams to push the technology further. With antialiasing implemented and anisotropic filtering close behind, they speculate that within two years the hardware will exist on the desktop to make 'game quality' raytracing graphics a reality."
I grew up with video games where the blob of pixels barely resembles anything. The power of gameplay, lasting gameplay far outstrips graphics. Not that a little eye candy doesn't hurt. I guess the core problem is that nothing Intel produces can run time optimize "Lair" into "Tetris" or otherwise correct for this.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
It's like what I used to say about pushing higher resolutions for television: Ten minutes into a GOOD show or movie and people are no longer conscious of the fact that they are watching it on a 12-inch black and white set.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Most people who pine for better game play are not looking hard enough. Generally they suffer form a severe case of nostalgia. Back int he bad old days for each Super Mario brothers or Missile command there were 4 ET's, Coeleco smurfs or Custer's Revenge. You just don't remember them. The past wasn't some golden age where game play trumps graphics. IT was a place where event he brilliant games had significant control issues, where top shelf games wouldn't been be considered tier 3 dreck today. Take a much maligned games liek Lair, is the basic controls any worse then say NARC for the NES? but NARC was a "good" game for it's time while Lair is a maligned as crap. I haven't played lair but bad controls are no longer acceptable.
There is game play innovation today, and it doesn't have to be independent of pretty graphics. In fact the people responsible for the game play aren't the ones responsible for innovative game play. One does not diminish the other. Good game play is also not the same as innovative game play. They coincide for instance in games like Katamari damacy but often innovation ~= unpolished ~= crap. What we're all looking for is polished game play. It never changes that around 80% of everything will be considered crap. So just rmeember that back int he day 80% of everything was crap too but you just don't remember. So they can ray trace graphics, thats awesome. Will it diminish gameplay.. not really you'll still have 80/20 rule. It's not an indication that things were better then before only that your brain works in a funny way.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I'll have to disagree with that. For many people "right" looking shadows are like the movies and television shows. Shadows and light/dark interplay in these environments are far from natural and even in ray-traced environments, animators laboriously juggle "fake" light sources to make the shadows "right" looking.
Also "single" bounce reflections are essentially "solved" problems with triangle rendering (environment maps), so only real advantages of ray tracing are "multi-bounce" and "self-shadowing" which are somewhat easier to solve in a ray-traced environment instead of a triangle rendered environment. Although sometimes these are interesting effects, they generally fall in the "eye-candy" side of the fence today and developers rarely spend much time on these (or so we hope given the state of game-play and AI in todays games), and they generally just implement canned solutions (e.g., some self-shadowing bump-map pixel shader technique) for certain "effects".
"Hey look, the photons accurately react with the environment according to current laws of physics! Finally they figured out how to make games fun!"
:-\
The obsession with graphics is ruining the gaming industry. Compare the PS3's sales to the Wii's for evidence.