Intel Researchers Consider Ray-Tracing for Mobile Devices

An anonymous reader points out an Intel blog discussing the feasibility of Ray-Tracing on mobile hardware. The required processing power is reduced enough by the lower resolution on these devices that they could realistically run Ray-Traced games. We've discussed the basics of Ray-Tracing in the past. Quoting: "Moore's Law works in favor of Ray-Tracing, because it assures us that computers will get faster - much faster - while monitor resolutions will grow at a much slower pace. As computational capabilities outgrow computational requirements, the quality of rendering Ray-Tracing in real time will improve, and developers will have an opportunity to do more than ever before. We believe that with Ray-Tracing, developers will have an opportunity to deliver more content in less time, because when you render things in a physically correct environment, you can achieve high levels of quality very quickly, and with an engine that is scalable from the Ultra-Mobile to the Ultra-Powerful, Ray-Tracing may become a very popular technology in the upcoming years."

Comments

Good for Intel, needs more work

[should_be_linear]

As Intel couldn't compete with ATI/nVidia on 3D rendering performance, they simply redefined rules of the game. Now they seem ahead of everyone else in Real Time Raytraycing, at least based on publicly presented papers. Now, they need to integrate this into some bigger picture of "new gaming platform". If they manage to integrate this graphics with Java JVM in coherent way, so that developers can easier utilize multiple cores in games and be able to write games once, run on all platforms/future consoles as a bonus. That would be big step towards letting developers focus towards gameplay and not on DirectX/OpenGL/PS3/... API generations, extension nuances, tricks for simulating shades, optimizing polygon count in big scenes, ... ray-tracing is making all this simple without requiring effort on developer's side. Yes, I know Java is some percents slower then C++, but in Java it is so much easier to utilize multiple-cores (especially when it comes to debugging) that I am sure performance will be gained, not lost on modern CPUs.