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Students Evaluate Ray Tracing From Developers' Side

Posted by timothy on from the do-not-look-at-ray-with-remaining-eye dept.

Vigile writes "Much has been said about ray tracing for gaming in recent weeks: luminaries like John Carmack, Cevat Yerli and NVIDIA's David Kirk have already placed their flags in the ground but what about developers that have actually worked on fully ray traced games? PC Perspective discusses the benefits and problems in art creation, programming and design on a ray traced game engine with a group of students working on two separate projects. These are not AAA-class titles but they do offer some great insights for anyone considering the ray tracing and rasterization debate."

1 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. Debate? by Vectronic · · Score: 4, Informative

    "...ray tracing and rasterization debate"

    I don't think there is any debate at all, RayTracing is by far superior, there is just the problem of computing power.

    Anyone (perhaps ask the modelers for the games) who deals with 3D software, knows the benefits of RayTracing for simulating reality (Reflections, Ambient Occlusion, Sub-Surface Scattering, etc)

    And once computing power reaches that level it will even speed up the process of creating games because you can let the RayTracing take care of shadows, reflections, highlights, etc instead of manually mapping them.

    Take a look at anything LightWave, Maya, 3Dsmax, Softimage, Blender, etc spits out of its render engines, or visual effects in recent movies... granted, that's (as stated a few times in the discussion) years away... but, I don't think anyone is arguing against RayTracing.

    (-1 Bastard) ...but...whatever, ive been waiting for real-time RayTracing for years even just within my own 3D applications, nevermind games...