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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."
Saying something sucks if he's already developing a product for it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Seriously though, does anyone expect Nvidia to say, "Yes, we really do think that our products will all be obsolete and outdated in a few years. Thank you for asking." I personally have no idea as to whether or not ray tracing is the future of games, but I really don't think that Nvidia is the right person to ask either, (just as Intel isn't).
Personally, I prefer spites to either ray-trace or polygons. I still thing Starcraft (the game, not the conversion van) had some of the best graphics. But then I am kind of a fuddy-duddy. I also think River Raid was an awesome game.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
For the most part, I really don't see ray-tracing adding much to the world of gaming that isn't being handled well enough by current methods. Unless someone was specifically creating games that somehow directly incorporated either the benefits or the added calculations involved with ray-tracing itself, it would only be a costly, and highly inefficient gimmick of an alternative to current techniques.
Sure, ray-tracing has its place in a lot of areas, but real-time gaming would be a terrible misuse of processing horsepower... especially when you could be applying it to other areas of gaming that actually affect gameplay itself. For example, how about more robust AIs for in game elements, or high-end physics processing that can combine things like fabric/hair/ fluid/fire physics processing with the ability to decimate objects completely as vector-calculated chunks based on the surrounding environments, rather than all this predetermined destruction we currently see in games. (Example, a surface could be eroded incrimentally by having a fluid running acrossed it until a hole forms in the shape of the fluid path...)
8==8 Bones 8==8