Intel Shows Off Quake Wars, Ray Traced

An anonymous reader writes "At the Research@Intel Day 2008, Intel showed a ray-traced version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Compared to the original game, a water with reflections and refractions and a physically correct glass shader were added. Also, a camera portal with up to 200 recursions to itself has been demonstrated. To show off this ongoing research in the topic of real-time ray tracing, a four-socket system with quad cores has been used that allowed rendering the enhanced visual effects in 1280x720 at 14-29 fps. Just two years before, early versions of Quake 4: Ray Traced ran only at 256x256 with 17 fps. Even though Intel's upcoming Larrabee will be primarily a rasterizer, the capabilities for also doing ray tracing on it should deliver interesting opportunities."

Comments

Re:Meh

[larry bagina]

I guess you don't realize it, but POV-Ray is not FREE (as in GPL) software. While it is free (as in beer), users are denied fundamental human rights that the GPL enforces. Using and advocating POV-Ray is counterproductive.

call your bullshit.... Re:Height maps

[leuk_he]

There were workarounds for self modifying code (VirtualProtect) and if you were a developer you were aware of this. The real trouble comes when you want to run this code on a out of order cpu (P5). If it runs you loose a lot of performance with self modifying code.

and of course it gave me the opportunity to refer to it as a dynamic synth compiler :) The bitches were all over me, dawg! I get the technical part, but the part about "bitches all over me" makes it unbelievable.

Re:Why?

[Swampash]

I'm trying to think of a gorgeous game that sucked...

Unreal, 1998.