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NVIDIA Doubts Ray Tracing Is the Future of Games
SizeWise writes "After Intel's prominent work in ray tracing in the both the desktop and mobile spaces, many gamers might be thinking that the move to ray-tracing engines is inevitable. NVIDIA's Chief Scientist, Dr. David Kirk, thinks otherwise as revealed in this interview on rasterization and ray tracing. Kirk counters many of Intel's claims of ray tracing's superiority, such as the inherent benefit to polygon complexity, while pointing out areas where ray-tracing engines would falter, such as basic antialiasing. The interview concludes with discussions on mixing the two rendering technologies and whether NVIDIA hardware can efficiently handle ray tracing calculations as well."
A good way to mix both techniques is Relief Texture Mapping. It's a good way to get smooth surfaces thanks to the texture interpolation hardware, with no extra polygons.
Actually, I don't think that's true at all. Raytracing, just like today's rasterizers, can greatly benefit from dedicated hardware for doing vector operations, geometry manipulation, and so forth. This is particularly true as raytracing benefits greatly from parallelization, and it would be far easier to build a dedicated card with a nice fat bus for shunting geometry and texture information between a large number of processing units than it would be to use a stock, general multicore processor which isn't really designed with those specific applications in mind.
Besides, the whole reason to have separate, specialized gear for doing things like audio/visual processing is to free up the main CPU for doing other things. Heck, we're even seeing specialized, third-party hardware for doing things like physics and AI calculations, not to mention accelerators for H.264 decoding, etc. As such, I see no reason to move graphics rendering back to the main CPU(s).