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NVIDIA Doubts Ray Tracing Is the Future of Games

Posted by kdawson on from the pick-your-horse dept.

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."

5 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Relief Texture Mapping by DeKO · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Like we were expecting something else by Btarlinian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously though, does anyone expect Nvidia to say, "Yes, we really do think that our products will all be obsolete and outdated in a few years.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).

    1. Re:Like we were expecting something else by Abcd1234 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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).

  3. Obey your thirst... by Itninja · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. Re:What do the people that make the software say? by Squapper · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am an game-developing 3d-artist, and our biggest problem right now is the lack of ability to render complex per-pixel shaders (particulary on the PS3). But this is only a short-term problem, and what would we do with the ability to create more complex shaders? Fake the appearance of the benefits of Ray-tracing (more complex scenes and more realistic surfaces) of course!

    On the other hand, the film industry could be a good place to look for the future technology of computer games. And as it is right now, it's preferable to avoid the slowness of raytracing and fake the effects instead, even when making big blockbuster movies.