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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!"
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 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.
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.