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Students Evaluate Ray Tracing From Developers' Side
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."
Instead of a video card you would just need a faster cpu, which if we base off of moore's law won't be much longer.
If the video card makers had picked up on the RPU you could use your video card to get realistic high frame-rate raytraced games today.
Dr Slusallek is working at nVidia now, so who knows?
The point is that, in raytracing, you can assign each of your 800 "stream processors" different pixels. Done. You're parallel. When one finishes, give it another pixel to work on, and repeat until you've rendered the whole thing.
Each core still has to iterate over all (well, some, I'm oversimplifying) of the triangles, but it can do so COMPLETELY INDEPENDENTLY of the other cores and still come up with a good result. Your performance gains are almost linearly proportional to the number of cores.
You can even have a relatively high-latency connection (Gigabit Ethernet, for instance) between the various cores, broadcast the scene data over this connection, and then receive individual "chunks" of rendered pixels back. I defy you to do that with rasterization.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM