Slashdot Mirror
Carmack Speaks On Ray Tracing, Future id Engines
Vigile writes "As a matter of principle, when legendary game programmer John Carmack speaks, the entire industry listens. In a recent interview he comments on a multitude of topics starting with information about Intel, their ray tracing research and upcoming Larrabee GPU. Carmack seems to think that Intel's direction using traditional ray tracing methods is not going to work and instead theorizes that using ray casting to traverse a new data structure he is developing is the best course of action. The 'sparse voxel octree' that Carmack discusses would allow for 'unique geometry down to the equivalent of the texel across everything.' He goes on to discuss other topics like the hardware necessary to efficiently process his new data structure, translation to consoles, multi-GPU PC gaming and even the world of hardware physics."
Bog standard ray tracing, which is what intel are harping on about at the moment isn't the be all and end all of global illumination algorithms, as many people who get all misty eyed about the technique would have you believe. It's terrible for diffuse interactions for one thing. Photon mapping is a more realistic technique which simulates light more accurately.
Tim.
Funny. It's just freaking amazing that someone would even stoop so low as to mention Gabe Newell and not know Carmack. Hell, the original Half-Life is written on the Quake engine written by Carmack.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Except the double-slit experiment. It's based on the fact that light has wavefront qualities, while ray tracing treats it as particles.
I also strongly doubt that the discreet ray approach will ever produce very good global illumination, since the number of rays bouncing between surfaces quickly grows towards infinite as the desired accuracy grows.
You'd need to do "wavefront racing" to fix these, and I for one have no idea how to do this - solve the quantum field equations for each particle in the scene after inventing the Grand Unified Theory ?-)
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.