Crytek Bashes Intel's Ray Tracing Plans

Vigile writes "Despite all good intentions, Intel continues to see a lot of its work on ray tracing countered not only by their competition, as you'd expect, but also by the very developers that Intel is going to depend on for success in the gaming market. The first major developer to speak on the Intel Larrabee and ray tracing debate was id Software's John Carmack, who basically said that Intel's current plans weren't likely to be implemented soon or ever. This time Cevat Yerli, one of the Crytek developers responsible for the graphically impressive titles Far Cry and Crysis, sees at least 3-5 more years of pure rasterization technology before moving to a hybrid rendering compromise. Intel has previously eschewed the idea of mixed rendering, but with more and more developers chiming in for it, it's likely where gaming will move."

Comments

Ray-Tracing Extremely CPU Intensive

[foxalopex]

It's no surprise that Intel is being bashed over their idea of real-time CPU ray-tracing. As anyone who has ever ray-traced will realize it's extremely slow. At times you're talking about HOURS PER FRAME while realistically you want at least 30 frames per second and even that isn't considered great by many gamers. It's going to take a HUGE and I mean HUGE increase in computation power before that happens. Rasterization techniques are tremendously faster and they look nearly as good as Ray-tracing for the most part. Considering that we're yet to reach a point in Rasterization where we don't need more processing power (Crysis in high resolution.) I don't see us moving away from it yet. The day when we declare that we have graphics cards more powerful than we need for Rasterization is when we start moving towards ray-tracing. That day isn't anytime soon unfortunately.

Re:Ray-Tracing Extremely CPU Intensive

[Yetihehe]

Here it goes again. Try to rasterize on CPU. It will be similarly slow. On the other hand with good hardware (like raytracing on gpu (PDF), or on cell processor (PDF), or just on PS3 cluster) is ALREADY possible. If you could make custom accelerator for raytracing (PDF) gamers and graphicians would love it.

Re:Ray-Tracing Extremely CPU Intensive

[andersbergh]

No it's not, usually games have a separate loop for logic (physics, AI, etc) running at say, 30 fps. If the GPU can push more frames than that, then why not.

Re:Ray-Tracing Extremely CPU Intensive

[DrXym]

Those PS3 tech demos are cool but could more accurately be called ray casting. They bounce a primary and maybe a secondary ray off some fairly simple scenes. I expect if you looked close up there would be jaggies all over the shop, and things like reflection & shadows would be brutal. Proper ray tracing requires sub pixel sampling with jitter and recursion to look even remotely acceptable.

I don't think anyone denies that ray tracing is lovely etc., but its a question of whether it is remotely feasible to do it on the current generation of CPUs or GPUs. If it takes a cluster of Cell processors (basically super fast number shovels) to render a simple scene you can bet we are some way off from it being viable yet.

Maybe in the mean time it is more suitable for lighting / reflection effects and is used in conjunction with traditional techniques.

Re:Ray-Tracing Extremely CPU Intensive

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Since quake1, and everything dervived from it in some way.

Yes its not a 'wise decision', but not all decisions can be made based on whats most logical..sometimes you need to cut corners based on what will work fastest or easiest.

In quake your movespeed and your ability to move/accelerate in the air is based entirely on your fps. Some trick jumps can't be done without a certain framerate.

In quake3 that changes more into your jump height, but the same end result -- Some jumps require certain fps to become possible.

In any HL based game your ability to slide up a steep wall instead of slide down it is impacted by your fps (and also the servers framerate).

In TFC hwguy assault cannon and a few other weapons would fire more often with higher fps.

In Natural Selection(1.x) how quick your jetpack fuel replenishes is based on your fps. Enough FPS and you could fly forever.

Theres more, but the tl;dr version: Any game that uses quake's "player.think()" system to do calculations will fire off more .think()s per second on clients with higher framerate.

Re:Ray-Tracing Extremely CPU Intensive

[xouumalperxe]

Bullshit. Just the same as raster graphics, the amount of time you spend per frame on ray-tracing is adjusted to your needs and desires. Take, say, a Pixar film. Those are mostly done with raster graphics, with key effects done with ray-tracing. How much time do you reckon it takes to render each of one of those films' frames? (Pixar films are all drawn with Photorealistic Renderman, which is based on the REYES algorithm, which reads like a fancy raster engine)

The part about computational power is another fine display of complete misrepresentation of reality. Raster graphics are this fast nowadays for two major reasons. The most obvious is because graphics cards entire massively parallel processors specialized in drawing raster graphics. It's pretty damn obvious that, given two techniques for the same result, the one for which you use a specialized processor will always be faster, which doesn't produce evidence that a technique is inherently faster than the other. The second, less obvious, is that raster graphics have been the focus of lots of research in recent years, which makes it a much more mature technology than ray-tracing. Once again, a more mature technology translates into better results, even if the core technique has no such advantage. What Intel is supposedly aiming for here is getting the specialized hardware and mindshare going for ray-tracing, which might lead to real-time ray tracing becoming a viable alternative for raster graphics.

Stop motion movies

[BadAnalogyGuy]

For years some claymation movies were set up by hand and shot frame by frame in a process called stop motion. While adequate, the resulting film was typically unnatural and the movements very stiff compared to live actors.

Enter ILM and go motion. Instead of filming static scenes, the clay was moved slightly during the shot to create a blurry frame. This blurry frame made the scene seem more realistic. The blur is what the eye picks up in the movie frame, so an actor walking in a scene is not a set of pinpoint focus shots but a series of blurs as the man moves.

Ray tracing is great for static scenes. But movement is the key to games that require this much detail, and so each frame should not be beautifully rendered framebuffers, but a mix of several framebuffers over the span of one frame. Star Wars did it great. Most computer games, not so much.

The best person to ask?

[Don_dumb]

Cevat Yerli, one of the Crytek developers responsible for the graphically impressive titles Far Cry and Crysis Is he the same developer who made a game (Crysis) so resource hungry that no gaming platform can handle it? Shouldn't we be asking someone who knows how to make a game look great on current hardware, such as Valve perhaps?

Re:The best person to ask?

[AioKits]

It's not THAT resource hungry! Sure, I mean, I had to steal, err, borrow a few human organs, particularly livers and kidneys and follow some archaic diagrams I found in my original Doom shareware documentation to create a device powerful enough to run Crysis at full capacity. But it worked damnit! For about 30 minutes... I think I got something wrong though when I built it because now all it wants to play is Doom 6, I didn't even realize there was a Doom 6 out yet! Oh, and there's this red 'gash' on the wall behind my desk. It's kinda oozing but but the drip pan takes care of that. One of my cats is missing too.

why bash?

[damnfuct]

Yeah, so it's going to take 3-5 years before anything real comes out of it. Do you think that process of using high-k hafnium in the 45 nm microprocessors was developed overnight? I'm sure intel is used to the R&D cycle, and 3-5 years is not unheard of. Besides, how much longer can you use rasterization "band aids" to address rending issues (reflections, shadows, light sources)? Rasterization is just a hack to try to implement features that simply "fall out" of ray tracing. Sure it's going to take computational power, but we're not going to be using pentium 75's.

Re:you've got it arse about face.

[AKAImBatman]

it's customers that drive the market, not developers.

In the case of a company like Intel who's pushing a new technology, the developers are the customers. It's not Joe Consumer who's going to be buying into Intel's technology. (At least not until there are games that support it.) It's going to be the developers. Developers who will be taking a gamble on a next generation technology in hopes that they lead the pack. And as history has proven, the first out of the gate often earns the most money. (At least in the short term.)

Of course, history has also proven that new technologies often fail. Thus the risk is commiserate with the reward. There may be a lot to gain, but there is also a lot to lose. A lot of dollar signs, that is.

Well... duh!

[Yvanhoe]

Carmack didn't really bashed it, neither did Crytek. They just make it clear that you can't have rasterization on day N and have raytracing on day N+1. A 3-5 years transition period is very reasonable. Using raytracing optimally requires to change the whole data structure of the virtual world. It would require making new modeling tools, new rendering engines, integrating new possibilities into the game design.
Keep also in mind that Intel proposes this as a future way of doing rendering. Their hardware is not even here yet. Given this, any prediction below 3 years would be quite surprising.

1. Consoles 2. ??? = Ray Tracing! 3. Profit?

[Colonel Korn]

Let's surmise for a minute:

The problem with ray tracing, as Carmack said, is that it will always be much slower than raster-based graphics with a given amount of computing power. He pointed out that there's nothing impressive about Intel's demo of a game from two generations ago running sort of acceptably at moderate resolution on an overpowered Intel demo system. He said that they'll never be able to produce a ray traced engine competitive with the state of the art raster-based games, so the ray tracing, while technically satisfying, will in every case offer poor performance for inferior graphics.

All of this boils down to a time lag. If raster graphics can do something in 2008, ray tracing can do it in 2012, etc. What if raster graphics stopped progressing for four years? Then ray tracing would have a chance to catch up, perhaps leading to new engines and APIs based on ray tracing, which would ensure long term use.

But wait...raster graphics have already been at a standstill for two years, for the first time since their inception. When the 360 came out and then the 8800 line showed up to put it firmly in its technical place, gaming graphics capabilities suddenly stopped. Not only did nVidia have its first unassailable lead over ATI in a long time, but suddenly the PC gaming market finally showed very strong signs of finally dying. Most of the remaining PC game developers shifted development to consoles, leading to (again as Carmack pointed out) a stationary graphical hardware target for new games. The overall number of PC gamers managed to stay high, but literally almost all of them were playing World of Warcraft, which has very low graphics card requirements.

Now two years have gone by, and WoW still dominates PC gaming, while only a few games have shown up that really push current hardware, with few people buying them. It's a pity that the most graphically impressive game is also quite mediocre when it comes to gameplay. There's very little market pressure on nVidia outside of the small enthusiast community, and they've managed to milk a 4x hardware lead over consoles for an unprecedented length of time. The graphics card industry used to beat the living crap out of Moore's Law, but now they've managed to eek out a 10% improvement in over two years, which is just sad. The next generation parts may or may not be coming soon, may or may not bring a large performance boost, and may or may not have any software at all to really justify their purchase.

Going waaaaay back to the beginning, CPU speeds over this same time period have been keeping up with their normal exponential increase in power. At this rate, it would only take two more generations of PC gaming failure for ray tracing on the CPU to catch up with rastering on the GPU, and if that happens, it could end up going to consoles. Hell, it might even be good for PC gaming's health. Currently most console players have a PC, but with its Intel integrated graphics it's only suited to playing games from 6-8 years ago. Already those same PCs can probably match that with ray tracing. If games were only dependent on CPU speed, they'd be a lot more accessible and easily played by a much larger part of the population.

Re:First out of the gate?

[AKAImBatman]

Your comment doesn't make a lick of sense. I mentioned that the early entrants into a new market make the most money in the short-term. You then try to refute my argument with a long-term argument. Logic error. Danger Will Robinson. Danger!

Was MySpace the first social networking site?

No. That dubious distinction belongs to Classmates.com, a site launching in 1995 that did quite well for itself and is still going strong. (Oddly.)

Was World of Warcraft the first MMORPG?

Neverwinter Nights, Ultima Online, and Everquest (nay, Evercrack!) were all highly successful and made their creators a lot of money in the short term.

Consider Ford versus Toyota/Honda/etc.

Consider what? Ford went gangbuster when it released the Model T to the market. In the short term, Ford's assembly-line approach effectively handed them the market. Toyota and Honda weren't competitors for nearly 80 years!

A word about raytracing purism.

[SilentBob0727]

Personally, I'd love to see realtime raytracing see the light of day because I recognize the math behind it as more "pure" than rasterization. Of course there are several algorithmic hurdles preventing pure realtime raytracing from seeing the light of day, unless you start to hyperparallelize the operations in a dedicated GPU, and even then there are obstacles; in the worst cases, a ray can bounce along an infinite path, dividing into multiple segments as it goes, leading to infinitely branched recursion until some heuristic or another cuts it short. And as we all know, "heuristic" is a fancy word for "cheat".

Further, raytracing cannot handle advanced refraction and reflection effects, like the surface of water causing uneven illumination at the bottom of a pool, or a bright red ball casting a red spot on a white piece of paper, without preemptive "photon mapping", which is another cheat.

In short, we have not been able improve upon the original raytracing algorithms without "cheating reality". Modern raytracing that includes photon mapping is a hybrid anyway. So the raytracing purists really have nothing to stand on until there's enough hardware to accurately calculate the paths of quadrillions of photons at high resolution sixty times a second. I'm not saying we won't get there, I'm saying probably not within this decade.

The reality is, the only advantage raytracing has over rasterization is its ability to compute reflection, refraction, and some atmospheric effects (e.g. a spotlight or a laser causing a visible halo in its path) with "physical" accuracy. The capabilities of rasterization have grown leaps and bounds since the 1960s, roughly linearly in proportion to available hardware.

Purists be damned. A hybrid of each technique utilizing what it's good at (raytracing for reflection, refraction, and atmospheric halos, rasterization for drawing the physical objects, "photon mapping" for advanced reflection and refraction effects) is likely the best approach here.