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

[*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.

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...