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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.'"
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
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.
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.
This way, they can post it as a dupe tomorrow, thus making it funny for multiple reasons.
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.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem