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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."
What NovaLogic called a "voxel space" in Comanche was really just a height map. I guess the reasoning is that a height map is just a run-length-encoded representation of a voxel space.
No screen captures, just pics taken with a camera? Um, Ok.
Certainly more gameplay and a decent storyline would make it a better game. But sadly, fancy graphics will probably sell more on opening day. (See spiderman sequels)
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Some very nominal special purpose hardware would eat this alive. Remember intel is using unaccelerated general purpose processors to do this!
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
Sorry, but expectations change. Fancy graphics don't make a good game, but poor graphics (as relative to the times) does make a game poorer. Once upon a time I was happy with jumping 2D sprites in 16 colors, but when you've played a visually stunning game you think "Why can't [good gameplay game] look like that? It'd be even better. Don't get me wrong, it's being a good game that makes me want to play it long in the first place but when I do play, it shouldn't look like an eyesore. Same as you wouldn't play a lousy game, but if a good game had poor and repetative music you'd get fed up with it. Not that everything has to be ultra-hyper-realistic, I for example love Sam & Max which is hardly the epitome of realism, but I for example like that they upgraded the graphics engine so I could play season 2 in 1920x1200, looks much better that way. I also played through the whole Oblivion (got fed up by the expansion tho) and the fact that it looked so good definately was one of the reasons I was at it that long. And half the reason me and a friend play through Bubble Bobble (you'd think we were emulator cheating if you saw a recording, we cruise through) is the catchy tune, the other half nostalgia. The only downside is that making a game is so much, much work than it was in the old days. Though honestly, I'd rather take 10 excellent games than 1000 ones in any category.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
One odd case in many. How many people go to the store and look at the back of the box for pictures of the game. How many game sites have screenshots... Graphics sell.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Except the graphics kind of look like crap. If it's going to run at 16fps it better look a LOT better than traditional optimized rendering. But.. well, they're very low-res screenshots and the texture detail is Quake III at best. I kind of raised my eyebrows at a few of those ET:QW shots; the environments seem very sparsely populated by anything except solid geometry and the near-solid white skies reminded me of Halo 1.
Can you even tell what the game looks like from the shots on the back? 1.5 inch square photos don't give you much of an idea of the graphics quality of a game. Especially when you don't know if the screenshot is from a cutscene or from actual gameplay.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I think you are missing the point a little here by ignoring one of the points people made before you. It's not like Intel has demonstrated amazing graphics using raytracing. Noone would want graphics like this in their games even today let alone in 4 years. Iff Intel can come up with a demonstration using raytracing that actually looks *better* than the "cheap trick" version then we can start counting down the days for when we will get that capability at home for an affordable price.
I predict that you'll eat those words one day.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
And yet Dwarf Fortress/Nethack/etc is so much fun, despite being ASCII. Perhaps even because of being ASCII.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Where's the HD video of the enhanced visual effects in 1280x720 at 14-29 fps?
Quoting min-max isn't what's needed, minimum is all that's required, my rig can, if looking directly at the ground, clock over 1000fps in some games, but that is of course a useless measure of the machine.
:P
Minimum usable framerate is around 35fps, if a fps drops under this, don't bother. Particularly don't bother if its going to cost 10 times the price for one tenth the framerate
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Maybe for the unrefined masses they do. As for me, I have been burned a few times before, so now I know that good graphics can't cover for crappy gameplay. When I look for a game, I try to get a demo and reviewes first. Looking on the box, as fascinating as it is, should be the last thing a person does.
Myst ? It seems this game is really a love or hate case. As far as I am concerned, I found most of the Myst games to be really terrific experiences. So immersive ! Riven (Myst II) went a bit over the top with puzzles, though.
It's all about the middle ground - the middle ground is what sucks.
Either extreme works really. You can go super-fancy with graphics and try to make everything look as slick as possible; or you can consciously choose not to have any of that and use only text, for example, or very simple graphics. Kingdom of Loathing is a good example of the latter.
However, trying to make your graphics look super-great and slick and then failing at it and only coming up with something that's run-of-the-mill and bog-standard at best... that sucks. And picking up your Nethack example again, that's why noone actually uses tilesets in Nethack, too.
Your short term memory must be failing you as well, because you mentioned Crysis not two paragraphs ago.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
There's no longer a real need to have specialized hardware to play MIDI or add effects to sounds,
Unless you are in Linux... oh I forgot there is this timidity hack which does not really work.
Because when they're *not* over at your house they're too busy playing singleplayer or internet multiplayer, neither segments are really covered by the Wii. The "friend code" thing (as opposed to, say, a memorable user name) has completely destroyed any chance for the Wii to ever become a popular internet multiplayer machine.
See... on the PS360 you got vast, epic RPGs, crazy single-player shoot-em-ups, and lots of awesome multiplayer action games (COD4, Halo 3, etc etc.), on the Wii you've got party games... Each console has its niche, but I do have to say that the signal-to-noise ratio on the Wii is pretty pathetic. For every Mario Kart you have a million other hastily-produced Wii games that aren't worth the discs they're pressed upon.
no it won't. As your data set increases, you become increasingly memory bound. You can have 4 cores pumping away at 100%, but if they are sitting there generating page faults and cache misses all over the place, you are going to see some pretty bad frame-rates.
Simply put, a GPU is fast because it can stream data at speeds > 1900Mhz. In comparison, a quad core intel machine with memory speeds of 800Mhz can't feed the cores with data fast enough. In my own tests, if you can keep the data requirements per-frame to approximately the size of the CPU cache, you can see some playable frame rates. As you go over that size, frame rates start to drop exponetially.
Ultimately though, i don't really buy into this 'raytracing is going to revolutionise game graphics' point of view. It's never really revolutionised the film FX world, where even now after 25+ years since Tron, the most commonly used techniques are based around REYES and global illumination models that do not rely on raytracing. Certainly renderers such as renderman have added raytracing extensions, which can be useful in certain situations, but ultimately the majority of FX shots don't really require them.