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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 ever happened to voxels?
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.
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.
No screen captures, just pics taken with a camera? Um, Ok.
With enemeies like that, who needs frames.
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!
I know it's all computationally intensive and impressive in that aspect, but pictures in the article don't really look much better than your average videogame. Same triangular shapes, ugly, clearly "rendered" landscapes.
I wonder if anyone tried to do hardware acceleration with, say, splines or something other than triangles.
Hyperom.com
Most people don't understand the beauty of ray tracing .... oh wait a minute, most people are DUMB! that's right >;D
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Seeing these comments reflects very well the average human intellect about a subject before talking about it.
Then what's so special in ray tracing versus rasterization?
It's actual real world based mimickery. Ray tracing mimicks how real world works.
Ask yourself would you prefer physics to correlate to real world physics, or something quickly around the corner which is something like that but not quite? That's the difference between rasterization and ray tracing. Rasterization comes close, but never is quite the real thing, while ray tracing works to replicate real world physics of light.
Yes, it actually is physics calculations, in this case, the physics of light and visualizing it.
Then there's things like radiosity tracing aswell
With Raytracing / radiosity tracing just provide enough computational power, and you can make it look real, like an photo. With rasterization you can't do that, to rasterize, and make proper looking shaders, they never get quite there, but even doing the shaders, you need to think about how the real world works first, how light travels, how it interacts with what it hits, in other words how the rays interact with objects.
Rasterization is JUST a cheap trick to make it look something like that, nothing else.
It's a bit like comparing veggie soy "meat" to the real thing It's something like it, but not really, just a "cheap trick".
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. in 4.5 years it becomes common, 6 years and it's every day. Be prepared for the coming of Ray Tracing. In about 7.5 to 9 years all graphics are probably ray tracing.
And that all without any software, or architectural advantages, it'll probably happer sooner with Intel making a hard effort to make it reality.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
The images clearly show that they are using simple colour mapping for the textures (especially the helicoptor). What I want to know is, can pixel shaders be used with ray tracing?
Sorry, being an industry insider, I have to post as an anonymous coward here.
There is no lighting, normal mapping, or material fidelity here. So this is a long way from being the quality of a final product, but it is a good demo and a start in the right direction.
Where's the HD video of the enhanced visual effects in 1280x720 at 14-29 fps?
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.
If you look at the crytek engine and how it calculates screen ambient occlusion, then you find there is a mix of ray tracing and raster technology. For instance, its suspected, they simulate a ray tracing but against the depth buffer in a fragment shader to get ambient occlusion.
By the way, please don't publish pictures on t.v. sets. It hurts the eyes.
Ultimately, ray tracing is going to win but not at 13 frames a second.
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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Phillip Slusallek was demonstrating full screen real time raytracing using a custom RPU (raytrace processing unit) in 2005, and that unit was running at less than 100 MHz. For a fraction of the hardware cost of a quad quad core system, you could do real time raytracing with less hardware investment than a modern GPU.
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