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Intel Shows Off Quake Wars, Ray Traced

Posted by timothy on from the this-time-I-really-mean-oooh-shiny dept.

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."

18 of 368 comments (clear)

  1. Why? by Iamthecheese · · Score: 5, Funny

    A lot of power for some eye candy. IANAG(gamer) but it seems to me that more investment into the story line and playability would go a lot further than raising the system requir --oooh shiny!

    --
    If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
    1. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      A lot of power for some eye candy.

      Only sixteen cores?! For real computing power, you'd could run even more cores-- perhaps (Beowolf?) cluster several million machines so that each is responsible for a single ray/pixel.

      Ultimately, this massively parallel distribution will provide data from an even bigger experiment-- what happens when you trace rays from the sun, bounce them off the earth, hit the CO2 layer, bounce back to the earth, back to the atmosphere, back to the earth...

    2. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      don't forget simulations of nuclear reactions, bending of space time and gravitational red shift while you are at it.

    3. Re:Why? by beav007 · · Score: 5, Funny

      The Wii was popular because of certain promised games which are still yet to be Wiileased.

    4. Re:Why? by WeblionX · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, but the sequels would suck.

      --
      (\(\
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    5. Re:Why? by indi0144 · · Score: 1, Funny

      do you want a $500 Ethernet cable with that?

    6. Re:Why? by Provocateur · · Score: 2, Funny

      Have they changed the gameplay recently? Is it all about the scenery? I'd rather a freight elevator or warehouse door whooshed open and suddenly the place would be overrun by angry hordes of zombies, orcs, cacodemons, pain elementals, heck even geohashers, all hungry for blood. Well, maybe not the geohashers. Use the processing power to draw more of my foes. Spare some to draw a raging fire in the background, the city in smoking ruins.

      --
      WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
    7. Re:Why? by Yetihehe · · Score: 2, Funny

      So you made another WW2 or Quake style game but with not such good graphics?

      --
      Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
    8. Re:Why? by dintech · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'm actually working on it

      Imagine realtime raytracing on beowulf cluster with output to your iphone...
      Ah, finally! An interview with a Duke Nukem Forever developer!
  2. Huh by gadzook33 · · Score: 5, Funny

    With enemeies like that, who needs frames.

  3. Congratulations Intel! by lowlymarine · · Score: 4, Funny

    Intel, you've done what only you can do! With $6,000 worth of top-of-the-line processors, you've almost duplicated the performance of a $60 RADEON 2400XT. Except with better reflections. Although even pixel-perfect reflections of crappy textures are, by definition, crappy textures. You're going to crush nVidia any day! I feel it, keep smack-talking!

  4. Re:Why do i feel that ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Now they used 16 cores to that, 4 cpus. Moore's law, CPU power doubles every 18 months, that means JUST 3 years before high end home users can enjoy something like that. Moore's law describes an important trend in the history of computer hardware: that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.

    It has nothing to do with CPU power. What was all that you were saying about most people and the average human intellect?
  5. Reflective spheres by manekineko2 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Every time ray tracing technology is shown off, I can't help but marvel that the long held dream of games filled with reflective spheres can finally be enabled.

    1. Re:Reflective spheres by Siridar · · Score: 5, Funny

      Don't forget! Those spheres need to be on a chessboard!

    2. Re:Reflective spheres by drsquare · · Score: 2, Funny

      Maybe they're building up to the ultimate pinball simulator?

  6. Take that, John Carmack! by OMNIpotusCOM · · Score: 4, Funny

    pfft... and John Carmack said that they were going the wrong direction with ray tracing. Shows how much he knows. And they only pulled it off with 4 quadcore processors at 15 FPS. That'll show you! Maybe someone should tell Carmack to go back to developing new shades of black instead of dealing with the light! /sarcasm

  7. Re:Height maps by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    you forgot to add "get off my tubes!"

  8. Re:Why do i feel that ... by RiotingPacifist · · Score: 3, Funny

    Yeah all these crappy games with their Newtonian physics, when I run time doesn't even slow down, whats that about! stupid approximations!!!

    --
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