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Ray Tracing To Debut in DirectX 11
crazyeyes writes "This is breaking news. Microsoft has not only decided to support ray tracing in DirectX 11, but they will also be basing it on Intel's x86 ray-tracing technology and get this ... it will be out by the end of the year!
In this article, we will examine what ray tracing is all about and why it would be superior to the current raster-based technology. As for performance, well, let Intel dazzle you with some numbers. Here's a quote from the article: 'You need not worry about your old raster-based DirectX 10 or older games or graphics cards. DirectX 11 will continue to support rasterization. It just includes support for ray-tracing as well. There will be two DirectX 11 modes, based on support by the application and the hardware.'"
But I am really annoyed that April Fool's has now become a multi-day event.
If one's thing sure. Pity DirectX11 will work on so few platforms.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Or maybe just obvious to anyone in the industry. Since clock speeds are bounded and not getting any faster and you can only lower voltages so much before signals get lost in the noise, the only way forward is in parallelism and ray tracing is wondrously parallelifyable (is that a real word?).
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Say it with me: 30 days has September, April, June and November. All the rest have 31, except February which has 28... (someone messed up their April Fools joke, judging by the "industry responses")
Yeah, but you'll have to buy a new post-Vista operating system just to get this nifty new feature.
Microsoft: "Pleeeeeease buy Vista! We'll even give you more eye candy!"
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
If this isn't an April Fools joke- maybe they could get DX-10 to work first, before worrying about DX-11?(!)
Dugg, for breaking news.
It says nvidia will be locked out because DirectX11 raytracing will be based on x86.
Wasn't DirectX meant to be a generic middleman to allow developers to abstract away from the specific implementations?
Isn't this a backwards step that basically cuts anyone developing for it out of using the code on other systems (and I am meaning even the xbox 360).
liqbase
Ray tracing to debut in Direct X11
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
DX10 is Vista-only. I'm going to guess DX11 will be the same. Which means I'll never see it in action, as I will switch to Linux before I switch to Vista.
This is great news for the 14 people who actually own Vista.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I can't wait until I run Windows to be able to experience the awesome benefits of all the hard work that has gone in to coding this masterpiece.
An interesting read on this very subject here. Quote:
"I have my own personal hobby horse in this race and have some fairly firm opinions on the way things are going right now. I think that ray tracing in the classical sense, of analytically intersecting rays with conventionally defined geometry, whether they be triangle meshes or higher order primitives, I'm not really bullish on that taking over for primary rendering tasks which is essentially what Intel is pushing."
Carmack admits he has his own personal preference, but generally he's pretty sensible about these things. He's usually called it correctly in the past when people have pushed various technologies that were supposed to take over the world, and they've fallen by the wayside.
Hopefully he'll chime into this latest article with some further thoughts.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
... will be ensured by using ray tracing to render characters in your word processing application! Finally, Vista will get some love.
Out by end of the year in MICROSOFT TIME means OUT BY 2011 - Q4. Maybe.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
How does it differ from regular X11?
Cairo, Longhorn and Windows 7 are all the same thing, vapor used to crush working implementations.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
More comments from David Kirk.
I would be very interested in what he learned between 2002 and 2004 that led him to argue so eloquently against Phillip Slusallek. I'd also like to know what Professor Slusallek is doing at nVidia, where he's "working with the research group on the future of realtime ray tracing".
Intel has this article about the hardware needed to run at 50fps at 1920x1080p. They're claiming you need 8 cores. In a couple of years, that could well be within reach for most gamers.
There's also this John Carmack Interview. Carmack isn't too optimistic about ray tracing replacing rasterized graphics.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=532&type=overview
...and you've eaten your pen. simply stunning.
run Duke Nukem Forever?
it's = it is
its = belonging to it
I haven't really been in the 3d-graphics-API scene for awhile, so I'm wondering what's available for OpenGL raytracing. There are a bunch of plugins etc for 3d-rendering that I remember, such as POVRay, etc, but how about realtime?
Anyone know if there's anything available/in-the-works?
Raytracing allows the implementation of mirrors in 3d environments.
Finally all business software will have the feature of showing the cause of most problems. (See also "Error Id: 10T" and PEBKAC)
SaarCOR was getting about 10 FPS for Quake3 with a minimal FPGA-based implementation of a hardware raytracer running at less than 100 MHz with a fraction of the gate budget of a modern GPU... in 2005. Raytracing is highly scalable - it's an "embarrassingly parallelizable" problem - so if nVidia is really working on raytracing hardware they could well be able to beat Intel to the punch.
DX11, like DX10, will probably be Vista-only. So, will Intel build OpenGL support, roll their own API, or tie the success or failure of their graphics architecture to Vista?
For great justice.
You will be dazzled and wowed by the suggestion that, get this, submitters should learn style (and how!) and those who approve stories should edit them for style! Get this! Yeah!
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
povray (www.povray.org) won't be outdated anytime soonish, I guess. Today there is more than raytracing to it, like light scattering effects etc. Still, if those additional effects are done in hardware too, povray and other renderers may face an uphill battle. Like within just a few years.
So basically you have one company who is looking for a reason to force people to upgrade their hardware working in tandem with another company who wants to force people to upgrade their software to push a technology that no current system is able to support adequately.
I am shocked! SHOCKED I SAY!!
Don't be unfair, is not Microsoft intentionally delivering what they promise far later, is that they measure time in an exponential curve while we measure it in a linear one, so the last month for them of this wait will take several of ours (if happens in our lifetime, at least).
OF course, there's an existing, vendor-neutral raytracing API that is like OpenGL, only for raytracing. Will microsoft implement it? Will they fuck.
http://www.openrt.de/gallery.php
No, I thought not...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
This is very obviously a lie or joke for early April fools. I didn't know Slashdot fell for them. Did anyone actually read the last page?
This is interesting to those of us buying new PCs right now. I was not sure whether to go with a dual or quad core. The problem is that very few applications that I would run actually make use of quad cores, but stuff like raytracing is highly parallel, so this gives me hope that purchasing a quad core processor won't be a waste of money.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I'll hold on to Imagine for my Amiga until it's pried from my cold, dead hands.
34.2 minutes per rendered frame gives me plenty of time to do other things around the house.
Actually, I would have mentioned Turbo Silver instead if there were any good links for it.
Ray tracing has been around for decades, and it's been steadily getting faster. Even in the 1980's, it was clear that eventually it would be doable in real-time. And there have been real-time ray tracing demonstrations around for several years now.
So, there is nothing "forward thinking" about this, Microsoft is simply following industry trends.
So Direct X is getting it. Are we likely to see something similar with OpenGL?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
A number of people refer to raytracing as an "embarrassingly parallel" process. The implication in the term being that there's no need for communication between each core or thread or process: they each just get handed a rectangular portion of the offscreen screen memory, and they do their job alone, and when they're all done, then the screen can be flipped to show the results.
I will grant that the actual rendering of pixels is indeed independent, but that's not the proposal. Nobody wants the same geometry shot from the same camera angle with the same lights to be rendered at 50Hz. They want motion. The lights move. The camera moves. The geometry moves. Every frame is different. And while the pixel-pushing is embarrassingly parallel, each one of those cores is going to have to be told what to draw each time around. Shared memory throttles the effectiveness of parallel processing. Shared caches, shared pipelines, shared buses, shared anything.
As the core count goes up, so does the cost of fanning out the new geometry updates every frame. I'm not going to say it's a deal-breaker, but it's hardly an "embarrassingly parallel" problem.
[
TFA states I don't know where these guys get their information, but even Microsoft does planning ahead of time for products they create - especially if it's to be released the same year! The absurdity climaxes at the third page...do yourself a favor and read it for a little laugh.
Service Pack 2? Sure, SP1 wasn't an improvement and SP2 might be needed - but, again, plans for this would have been more well announced or planned by Microsoft.
Sorry guys, article is simply BS.
Oh, come on! This has to be either an early April Fool's Day joke or a false rumor. Maybe someday we will see something in this regards, but I think we are still quite a long way from practical implementations, which could provide ray tracing in such performance that it would be usable in gaming. Besides, there is no sources mentioned at the article, it seems to be based completely on rumors (or lies?) and at the end of the article, there is some "quotes" from manufacturers, which seem like a 12-year old kid has written them. Besides, what's the deal with all those smiley faces?
No, it did say Adam and Steve. That's what you get for reading a shoddy translation.
Instead of a reply buried in the RT vs. Raster debate that this article generated, I thought a reply to the entire thread would be more appropriate: WHHHOOOOOOOOOSSSSHHHHHHHHH.... As the joke flew over your head. It's an early post April Fools bit, people. However, it might serve some of us to step back and examine our need to defend our own prejudices... {nah... what am I thinking... this is Slashdot..... Carry on.}
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Is anyone else seeing this as MS' tactic to ensure that games develop for Windows will only run on Windows. What I mean by this is that MS is almost forcing developers to use a new technology that forces games to upgrade to Vista (most likely) and upgrade their machines. Real-time ray tracing seem experimental to me but I can see MS pushing it down the developers and users throats. Why? Amongst other things, MS wants to make sure that the next generation of Windows game will not be available to Cedega (or other platforms like the Mac) for as long as possible.
I'm not against ray-tracing or new APIs for games. I'm against MS using it as another strategy to lock gamers in Windows.
Oh, and don't get me started on the patents that MS will probably acquire concerning that technology.
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
I just looked at the calendar and let out a deep sigh. The entire internet is going to be unusable all week, isn't it?
The "revision date" of the article is listed as 01-04-2008 (which is pretty much anywhere outside the United States way of saying 04-01-2008). This is obviously an April Fool's joke, just read the last page with the comments from the various companies.
Oh, sorry, I forgot nobody actually reads articles on Slashdot, this is merely a forum for complaints!
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
Totally off-topic, but is there a FOSS equivalent of the Amiga's VistaPro software for terrain rendering? I loved playing with that program back in the day and I'd love to see it on something faster than a 68030@25MHz.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I thought PC gaming was in the throes of death. Fortunately now PC game developers will be able to use Ray Tracing instead of implementing the much ballyhooed 'fun' that graphically inferior console games seem to be touting.
I have nothing compelling to say
At first I parsed the headline as "Raytracing in Direct X11". Would be amusing to see, at least.
Is it just me or is this a stupid April fools joke? It's not funny, it's like it's just trying to get your hopes up.
Ugh.. Get ready for a whole day of hilariously deceptive articles like this..
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=526&pgno=2 (The pgno counter starts from 0 so 2 mean page 3)
There's no way the companies mentioned would say anything like that.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
a) OpenGL is an immediate-mode API - it doesn't store a "scene" it just processes a single polygon at a time.
b) You can't raytrace something unless you have access to the whole scene.
QED.
No sig today...
All of this talk about raytracing, and we still do not have high quality anti aliased renders with existing real time rendering methods.
:) It's just going to eat more pixel ponies for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Games still look like shit. NONE of them can even compare to the nice anti aliased images generated by software renderers.
Anti Aliasing is all fine and dandy, but when a game looks like shit, these days its due to anti aliasing. We can do plenty of visually stunning things in realitime but no matter what you do, it still looks like a video game because the damn hardware cant render high resolution enough with high quality anti aliasing enabled.
How in the hell will raytracing solve that?
Look at Gran Turismo on PS3. All of their PR videos have anti aliasing enabled and the game looks photoreal. However the reality is they're lying in their screenshots. The game itself does not use anti aliasing, thus making it look like a videogame. With Anti aliasing enabled, its photoreal, without, it looks like shit.
This is an old problem, which the hardware companies have addressed... they just cant deliver on performance.
But they can on raytracing? No thanks. Anti aliasing in ray tracing renderers is even slower. I dont care how accurate the reflects are, if its aliased to shit... it will never look convincing.
This can't be Windows 7 only - Linux has had Direct X11 for years. This is yet another case of Microsoft playing catchup.
Sig? What's that? Oh, 'signature'...and it's supposed to be witty? Right...
I could hardly stand the first page with all those horrid popup advertisement links.
The best part of the joke, I suppose, you can already get a year old real time ray tracing set from IBM for PS3 (cell). This kind of makes the rest of it look like the desperate catch up it is.
No calls now, I'm
It's already April 1st in some parts of the world.
Yeah, the quotes are hilarious. I suppose it is already April 1st in Malaysia =]
Funny I was half-fooled until I read that last page. I suppose I never underestimate the power of corporate bureaucracy and profiteering trumping the concerns of us consumers.
Try this instead. Real time ray tracing is real already.
No calls now, I'm
Under Windows XP?
It sounds nice, but if it's Vista-only, I don't care.
Perhaps it'll work on X11
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
A joke? There is definite possibility of an almost maybe that this is true.
I've been waiting sixteen f@$*ing years to find out what the fuss is all about.
Now where's that damned Wolf 3D floppy?
Steve is a transgender man.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Not seeing what Microsoft has to do with X11 POV-Ray. been using it for like a decade now.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
oblig.
What about you? You're still running Vista.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
Can this mean finally we don't have to awkwardly try to construct things out of polygons which are more naturally described as functions? Down with polygons!
GNU/Linux has had realtime ray tracing for a year now, even though it seems like an obvious joke when announced for Windows. That's something people would like to know and some good information that can come out of this bad joke.
Take your crazy Twitter hate and modpoint games someplace else. They are getting in the way of the conversation here.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
The YouTube demonstration is especially cool, especially when you consider they did it without GPU support of any kind.
I don't think we have anything to fear about a Windows or Intel crushing, the people at IBM knew where they were going with Cell. With new process technology it won't be long before you can do this with a single 24 cell processor, not that three or four PS3s would break anyone's budget right now.
No calls now, I'm
Actually God didn't create anything. Adam, Eve, Steve and all the others CREATED God. Big Difference! And, forgive me if I ask, what is a Gay Agenda and in which bookstore can I find one? I asked my gay friends but they said they stopped using agendas once they graduated from school, now they use laptops. Gateway, Dell and HP don't have Gay Laptops so I'm assuming these people are using generic ones.
But aren't we all raytraced??? Or in this context, traced by Ray??? :)
I rather be surrounded by gays than religious freaks!
Damn straight.
Gay people don't want to take over the world. They just want to redecorate it.
Keep it up!
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Keeping track of all those sockpuppets is hard, isn't it?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
it was much easier to read the 'tags' section where taco labeled this as 'aprilfools' and 'fake'
;)
rtfa? why not read the fine tags
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Anyone who has knows a bit about computer graphics will suspect this is a joke from the heading itself, and then when you look at the ray-traced image comparison all doubt is removed (especially because it seems to use global illumination). I was just upset they didn't spend more time on it. The joke could've been much better, showing realistic-looking specs, small rendering times etc.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
They're only talking about primary rays - camera rays. They use packets of coherent rays to speed up the hierarchy traversal. This falls apart for shadow rays and refracted rays etc... So they'll be able to use RT as a OpenGL or DX replacement, but you won't be seeing the effects RT is known for. I still predict 2012 for really good RTRT, and I first said that back around 2001. My library is still on track for that timeframe. Oh, and the Intel work to date is just for walk-throughs, not real games AFAIK.
The sad part is that one of the biggest Microsoft/IT related technology news in Brazil just fell for it...
And they call themselves Microsoft MVP!
And no, it is not April 1st in Brazil yet...
Intel's x86 ray-tracing technology
Can any game developers out there tell me if this is a good thing? What other options exist besides Intel's raytracer?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Assuming this was serious, just supporting "raytracing" doesn't mean games immediately will look better.
A lot of the things that look good in games nowadays is hacking the rasterizer to make it look the way you want. Using textures with opacity to simulate fields of grass, performing z-buffer post-processing to apply full screen effects, etc.
Raytracing seaks to emulate a physical lighting environment, and it alone is not enough to produce photorealism at the level we see in games nowadays. Other technologies are necessary to reach photo-realism with ray-tracing, such as radiosity calculations, soft shadows, multiple levels of refrection and refraction, self-illumination, translucency, volumetrics, etc. Each of these significantly hurts rendering speed.
Thank god the entire thing can be parallelized quite easily. The real limitations are ram, and cores.
When we have 32+gb of ram in our home pc's, and 64+ cores or more, the era of competitive looking raytraced games may begin. Until then it may be feasible to create these games, but they will not surpass known raster techniques for some time.
A combination raytrace/rasterization may also work very well in the next few years. with post-processing composition between the 2 engines. Raytracing would probably actually scale better then a rasterizer in certain situations.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
At least, for Google AU.
Now I understand your sig better.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I found this, dated 16th of march.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6457951.stm
I have not enough knowledge in IT to discern if this is a boast or not, but it seems real-time ray tracing is really not too far away...
It has cloaking technology? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking_device
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the
touche. you beat me to that one, sir.
+5, Truth