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

Inverse Moore's Law

[click2005]

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.

Inverse Moore's Law states that the more time that developers spend on making games look 'pretty', the less time they spend on playability.

Re:Inverse Moore's Law

[koh]

Inverse Moore's Law states that the more time that developers spend on making games look 'pretty', the less time they spend on playability. My psychic powers tell me you've played one of the recent Final Fantasy titles.

Re:Inverse Moore's Law

[jcnnghm]

You could probably argue that is why the Wii is selling so well.

Re:Inverse Moore's Law

[Slarty]

For games, at least, shadows don't need to be perfect. Neither do reflection and (especially) refraction. The goal is all about rendering something that looks plausible, not perfect (although it's a bonus if you can get it). For things like caustics, most people (and especially gamers) just aren't going to notice if the shadows or caustics or what-not are a tiny bit "off".

Current rasterization approaches use a lot of approximations, it's true, but they can get away with that because in interactive graphics, most things don't need to look perfect. It's true that there's been a lot of cool work done lately with interactive ray tracing, but for anything other than very simple renderings (mostly-static scenes with no global illumination and hard shadows), ray tracers *also* rely on a bunch of approximations. They have to: getting a "perfect", physically correct result is just not a process that scales well. (Check out The Rendering Equation on wikipedia or somewhere else if you're interested; there's a integral over the hemisphere in there that has to be evaluated, which can recursively turn into a multi-dimension integral over many hemispheres. Without cheating, the evaluation of that thing is going to kick Moore's law's ass for a long, long time.)

By the way, the claim that with a "physically correct environment, you can achieve high levels of quality very quickly" doesn't really make much sense. What's a "physically correct environment" and what is it about rasterization that can't render one? How are we defining "high levels of quality" here? And "very quickly" is just not something that applies much to ray tracers at the moment, especially in the company of "physically correct". :-)

Brilliant!

[neonmonk]

I can just see two moustached elderly gents discussing research, possibly even drinking Guinness out of a bottle. They go silent for a few minutes and then one of them, whilst stroking his long droop moustache suddenly jumps up and proclaims:

"Holy Crap! Mobile gaming devices have tiny screens, imagine how easy it'd be to use advanced raytracing graphics!"
"Brilliant!"

prog10

[k2enemy]

Too bad the source code for the highly optimized prog10 raytracer was lost in the great hard drive crash of '98.

Re:prog10

[ByteSlicer]

Man, I had to google that before I got it.

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.

Real time raytracing with POV-Ray

[Grard Menfin]

For those interested in real-time raytracing, the latest beta version of POV-Ray has a neat (but experimental) RTR feature. The source is now available for Windows and Unix/Linux. There also demo scenes available (and another demo scene with pre-baked textures can be found here).

Raytracing is not the holy grail of graphics

[igomaniac]

If you want to know the future of real-time graphics, look at what Pixar and other animation and special effects houses are doing. None of them are using ray-tracing except to achieve specific effects in specific circumstances. The fact is that global illumination combined with scanline renderers simply produce better pictures with less computational requirements.