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."

Comments

Big improvement on the way

[ackthpt]

Or is it? Simply means games will appear more eye-candy than they currently are. Gameplay will not change. EA will continue to use take last years sport game, through some new people into it, perhaps introduce some bug which makes it unusable and peddle it as The New Deluxe Edition. I wonder how many geometric objects it will be able to handle (and whether it handles transparancy with textures and patterns well) Having done a bit of raytracing I'm familiar with how quick things can bog down. It'll probably be a bit clunky at first, but get much better as horsepower and horsepower/dollar ratio improve.

There was some game I played on an Amiga (got that? A really old computer) where I raced around in an aircar zapping stuff (some bastard borrowed the game and I've never seen it since!) Very nicely rendered graphics, beautiful even, nearly looked ray-traced. Must have been about 15 years ago.

While I look forward to more realistic, or creative and beautiful gamescapes, do keep in mind -- we were all blown away by the first high quality animated films, now almost everything animated is rendered, raytraced, etc. and there's a lot of junk out there now. So this will be exciting for about 2 years then become "meh".

Lastly, they've got to get the motion down. Characters in games, including sports, look so damn wooden in their movement! That's where real improvement needs doing.

Re:Big improvement on the way

[AKAImBatman]

Simply means games will appear more eye-candy than they currently are. Gameplay will not change.

Untrue! Ray Tracing is a lot more flexible method of rendering than previous engines have allowed. Many engines have claimed features like "destructible levels and terrain", but the engines were never fast enough to give both the eye candy demanded by the market and an engine capable of such free-form interaction. Ray Tracing could change all that. Programmers could no longer be limited by BSP trees, visibility trees, polygon count, and other requirements imposed on traditional engines.

Graphics-wise, ray tracing could open new doors as well. For example, 3D adventure games haven't really taken off because it's harder to insert clues in the areas. A painting on a wall, for example, will tend to be slightly too blurry to see a clue embedded in it in a true 3D environment. Ray tracing allows for more precise rendering that would make the painting crystal clear from all perspectives and distances. Which means that the game designer could actually make it visible that the subject of the painting is pointing at a hidden door without making it so obvious that it destroys the enjoyment of the puzzle.

What I'm getting at is that graphics improvements have been one of the factors that have allowed game creators to explore new game genres in the past. While the 3D-age has often focused on rendering quality to the point of forgetting the purpose of graphical improvements, that's not to say that a major switch in technologies couldn't bring new gaming experiences with it.

Re:Big improvement on the way

[*weasel]

The canned solutions include precalculated light maps, mostly-static light sources and level designs that are carefully constructed to limit overdraw. The push for raytracing is more about removing the drawbacks of the current 'solutions', than notably improving eye candy.

E.g. raytracing solutions will free up developers to implement more-dynamic scenes, more-dynamic lights and level designs where buildings and cities aren't glorified mazes where 90% of the architecture is an impenetrable facade.
(Sure, some titles feature those sorts of things now - but they're expensive tricks, with severely limited implementation)

Not to be a wet blanket...

[SnoopJeDi]

...but Q4RT seems to have handicapped most of what makes the Doom 3 engine so impressive-looking to begin with. The reflection effects sure are nice, but it's a long way from making anything comparable to modern methods.

Sure is interesting, all the same.

Wow, real time -- glad I left that business

[dada21]

I was a founder of Deep Productions, one of the Chicago's first rendering farms about 15 years ago. I recall having dozens of Pentium 60s (Were they called Pentium Pros back then?) with 512MB of RAM (if I remember correctly) running a variety of rendering programs (usually 3D Studio, but others based on clients needs). IIRC, a single raytraced frame took about 20 minutes. 2 dozen machines churning full speed were able to render approximately 60 fields per hour, or 1 second of animation in an hour.

I exited that market and Deep eventually moved out of that field entirely, but looking back, I can't believe we made the money that we made at the time. Now that ray tracing is getting closer to real time, it gives me a few minutes pause to realize how much technology has changed in ways that the AVERAGE consumer has no understanding of -- and doesn't need to. In the end, I'm glad that so many entrepreneurs take risks so that consumers needs (and yes, entertainment for some is a need) and wants are fulfilled, without those consumers even knowing the process necessary to get there.

Handhelds first?

[Floritard]

if a certain configuration of hardware can render 1280x720 images at 30 frames per second, then that same hardware will be able to push 563 FPS at a resolution of 256x192 (which happens to be what the DS has). So why not make a handheld that can do real-time raytracing? Seems it would be easier to do. And that's a pretty good selling point to boast "better than PS3/360 graphics in the palm of your hand."

And to the above posts bemoaning the focus on graphics over gameplay, remember if they get a good real-time raytracing system in place then that frees the dev team up quite a bit. No longer having to work so hard on faking proper lighting, they can then focus on the more important things like gameplay/AI/physics.

Is it still relevant?

[ggambett]

I wonder if this is still relevant.

Don't get me wrong, I love raytracers, but what once was their exclusive domain (reflections, shadows,...) has been done in a "fake" but very convincing way since the few latest generations of 3D video cards. What's left? True refraction? True curved surfaces? Is it that important? I tend to side with the "give me gameplay" crowd here.

Realtime caustics and global illumination, on the other hand...

Re:Not the shiny new hammer

[DamnStupidElf]

Raytracing has no advantage over rasterizing for opaque surfaces. Rasterizers are faster there, since their performance is not tied directly to the screen resolution. The advantages lie in refraction/reflection/shadows/translucency, which are painful to implement with rasterizers.

Actually, there's a big advantage. Raytracing is O(log n), but rasterization is O(n). OpenRT's demo of a 350 million triangle model of a Boeing rendered in real time on a single PC (without GPU support) is a good example. The entire model doesn't even fit in memory, so visible surfaces are cached. The result is still realtime (although only a few FPS) with incredible detail. Go slashdot the server and watch the movie. Modern raster based cards can only render that many triangles in a whole second with all their fancy hardware, if they're lucky.

I think what he meant is

[Sycraft-fu]

"Where are we on the scale."

People sometimes get a little too giddy talking about Big O notation. Yes, something that scales logarithmicly rather than linearly will eventually be faster, but it kinda depends on where you are now if that will happen any time soon and thus is worth worrying about. To use arbitrary units, suppose at an 'n' of 1000 is the intersection point between the line for rasterization and the curve for ray tracing. So when we pass 1000, it starts to be a case that ray tracing is more worthwhile. Now suppose that current generation of graphics is 100, and it grows at a rate of 2 per year. Ya... Ok, not going to be worrying about that any time soon.

I think that was his point is that just saying "But it's O(log n)!" doesn't mean it is necessarily better at this point.

Also there is the silicon problem to be considered. We don't do our graphics on general purpose processors, we do them on highly specialized DSPs that actually have only recently gained turning completeness (and aren't very good at it, they are really slow at branching among other things). The graphics we see today are possible only because we can make a special purpose processor that can accelerate them very efficiently. Can the same be done for raytracing? I don't know. I mean I'm sure it is possible to an extent, especially since it is a very parallel problem, but that doesn't mean that we will be able to as efficiently accelerate it.

So while it is appreciated that at some point, on equal general purpose hardware, ray tracing is more efficient that isn't the question. The question is What is that point (and how soon will we reach it) and does that carry over to the special purpose graphics hardware?