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.'"

Comments

Looks like a shun to current GPUs

[LiquidCoooled]

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).

John Carmack on Ray Tracing

[Reality Master 101]

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.

How many times can you fall for an old trick?

[Mactrope]

Cairo, Longhorn and Windows 7 are all the same thing, vapor used to crush working implementations.

More from David Kirk?

[argent]

"I'll be interested in discussing a bigger question, though: 'When will hardware graphics pipelines become sufficiently programmable to efficiently implement ray tracing and other global illumination techniques?'. I believe that the answer is now, and more so from now on! As GPUs become increasingly programmable, the variety of algorithms that can be mapped onto the computing substrate of a GPU becomes ever broader.

As part of this quest, I routinely ask artists and programmers at movie and special effects studios what features and flexibility they will need to do their rendering on GPUs, and they say that they could never render on hardware! What do they use now: crayons? Actually, they use hardware now, in the form of programmable general-purpose CPUs. I believe that the future convergence of realistic and real-time rendering lies in highly programmable special-purpose GPUs."

Very interesting. A couple of years later he was arguing against special purpose GPUs for ray tracing, and for the use of "General Purpose GPUs", and the new nVidia 8xxx series seem to be following that path... away from dedicated rendering pipelines and towards a GPU that's more like a highly parallel CPU.

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".

Some less breathless articles

[jmichaelg]

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.

Re:Call me old and grumpy

[Dachannien]

This way, they can post it as a dupe tomorrow, thus making it funny for multiple reasons.

Re:Call me old and grumpy

[Nimey]

They've been doing this for a while before OMG PONIES actually. There was one year where they had a really good April Fools' post about how Microsoft was doing something evil to Slashdot (cease-and-desisting or something) but too many people forgot what day it was & it got blown out of proportion.

So now we have the current situation of stories so stupid that anyone can tell they're fake.

Re:Call me old and grumpy

[Anonymous Coward]

I demand ponies! Seriously, Slashdot should revisit that joke.

Just ignore the people that are going to call it a dupe.

Fuck raytracing... How about ANTI ALIASING!

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

All of this talk about raytracing, and we still do not have high quality anti aliased renders with existing real time rendering methods.

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? :) It's just going to eat more pixel ponies for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

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.

Re:Only available with Windows 7

[Crimson Wing]

SP1 wasn't an improvement

Vista SP1 wasn't an improvement? What about those, like me, who have seen improved network speeds, file transfer rates, and lower RAM consumption with SP1?