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Ray Tracing for Gaming Explored

Posted by Soulskill on from the pretty-pictures dept.

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."

4 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Ray tracing is so wrong... by Oscaro · · Score: 0, Troll

    I keep finding people who think that ray tracing is some kind of "perfect" rendering algorithm.

    Actually I think of ray tracing as of the bubble-sort of computer graphics. It is absurdly naive, completely inefficient, and totally not necessary, especially for real time graphics. There are lots of different approaches to rendering that are much more flexible, efficient, and feasible.

  2. Re:Adaptive techniques: make or break by GNUALMAFUERTE · · Score: 0, Troll

    I have worked on Unix all my life. 5 Years as a Sysadmin, 3 years Coding. I have worked for a midsized ISP, a Hosting Company, 2 Telcos, and 2 software factories.

    Somebody has an IQ lower than his body temperature?

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    WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
  3. Re:No, raytracing is BETTER adapted to custom chip by Sloppy · · Score: 0, Troll

    A custom chip that has hundreds or thousands of dedicated raytracing processors that run in parallel [solves it].

    Dedicated. *sigh* So I have this huge expensive chunk of silicon, and all it's good for, is playing games? That's swell when I happen to be playing a game. What about the other 95% of the day?

    A dedicated raytracer built with nVidia's or ATI's or Intel's resources instead of Saarland University's could give you that thousand core processor right now.

    Cool, but does it run Linux? ;-)

    (Note: I'm not asking for a driver; I'm asking for a port.)

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  4. So worth the karma burn by jorgevillalobos · · Score: 0, Troll

    Douche.