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Ray Tracing for Gaming Explored
Vigile brings us a follow-up to a discussion we had recently about efforts to make ray tracing a reality for video games. Daniel Pohl, a research scientist at Intel, takes us through the nuts and bolts of how ray tracing works, and he talks about how games such as Portal can benefit from this technology. Pohl also touches on the difficulty in mixing ray tracing with current methods of rendering. Quoting:
"How will ray tracing for games hit the market? Many people expect it to be a smooth transition - raster only to raster plus ray tracing combined, transitioning to completely ray traced eventually. They think that in the early stages, most of the image would be still rasterized and ray tracing would be used sparingly, only in some small areas such as on a reflecting sphere. It is a nice thought and reflects what has happened so far in the development of graphics cards. The only problem is: Technically it makes no sense."
I think you're missing the point. The reason Quake 4 looks crap raytraced was because it wasn't written to be raytraced, no shaders are being applied (because they were all written for a raster engine) so of course it looks bad. This stuff is just research.
One of the biggest hurdle in game graphics is geometry detail. Normal mapping is just a hack to make things appear more detailed, it breaks down in some situations. Raytracing will allow *much* higher geometry detail than rasterisation. Better reflection, refraction, caustics and so on are just gravy.
they have a graph that very clearly shows raytracing at a performance advantage as complexity increases.
No, they have a graph that very clearly shows that raytracing while using a binary tree to cull non-visible surfaces has a performance advantage over rasterizing while using nothing to cull non-visible surfaces. Perhaps someday a raster engine will regain that advantage by using these "BSP Trees" as well.