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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
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?
Ray tracing mimicks how real world works.
Raytracing doesn't mimic how real world works. In fact it does exactly the opposite of what happens in real world. In real world you have bazillions of light particles, doubling also as waves, shoot out of many area light sources and bounce/be absorbed by objects around them.
Whatever photons end up hitting your retina, is what you see.
Raytracing instead shoots a ray out of your (virtual) retina straight forward to the scene and may refract/reflect off objects, until it's "absorbed" (means, hits a surface where refraction/reflection isn't calculated).
Rendering a single frame of 3D as it is in the "real world" (with just a fraction of the rays) would mean days on even the fastest hardware out there.
What raytracing gives you is sharp reflections, refractions and shadows, while introducing a bunch of other limitations on the rendering that rasterization doesn't have. It also can't do soft shadows, reflections, refractions, efficiently, nor subsurface scattering, or radiosity.
Best models for rendering in the future will likely be hybrid models similar to what is now used in professional renderers by movie studios. But then again, it's a game, who cares about mathematicaly accurate reflections, when you can fake it close enough with reflection/refraction maps in a fraction of the processing time.
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.
For classical optics, modeling the scene in either direction (castings rays from lightsources and only counting ones that hit the viewer vs. casting rays from the viewer and only counting ones that hit lightsources) is valid.
I assume you didn't mean for "efficiently" to be an item in your list, which is the way you wrote it, but raytracers can do all of those things. (I'll make no claims about efficiency.)
"But then again, it's a game, who cares about mathematicaly accurate reflections, when you can fake it close enough with reflection/refraction maps in a fraction of the processing time."
That argument is no more valid that if you say "it's just a game, why don't you just do raycasting, which takes a fraction of the processing time". "Faking it close enough" isn't close enough; it's obvious that you're faking it, and it requires that you either live with it or design your game to minimize the impact of faking it.
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