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NVIDIA Shows Interactive Ray Tracing On GPUs
MojoKid writes "During SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles, NVIDIA is demonstrating a fully interactive GPU-based ray tracer. The demo is based purely on NVIDIA GPU technology, and according to NVIDIA the ray tracer shows linear scaling during rendering of a complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application. The article reproduces screenshots from NVIDIA's demo. At three bounces (rays being traced as they bounce three times through a scene), performance is demonstrated at up to 30fps at HD resolutions of 1920x1080 for an image-based lighting paint shader, ray-traced shadows, reflections and refractions running on four next-generation Quadro GPUs in an NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing System." Meanwhile reader arcticstoat passes on Intel's latest claim that rasterisation will die out the next few years, possibly in favour of ray tracing.
Wow, those screen caps are gorgeous. I hope this finally puts to rest the idea that rasterizing with upteenth number of features added in can compete with the image quality of Raytracing. While rasterizing may have a number of competitive features, it's hard to get the same level of specularity, reflection, shadows, shading, and other features so nicely demonstrated by this demo.
The genius of what NVidia is doing here, I think, is that by using their existing GPU architecture, they create a path by which Raytracing can be phased in as a technology without removing the support and investment in current rendering pipelines. This is a bit different from Intel's goal, which appears to be a cutoff between the old and the new.
Another interesting point is that this demo is currently capped at 3 casts per pixel. Which means that the scenes shown could look even better than they already do. Shadows could be softer, reflections could be more complex, and inventive scenes could be created to make for interesting styles of gameplay. (e.g. Fighting in a hall of mirrors.) If 3 casts/pixel is the baseline, then NVidia is setting up a vast new territory for graphical improvements. Each increase in casts/pixel will increase the realism of the scene. Thus graphical quality becomes a matter of raw horsepower. A market that I'm sure NVidia would gladly be interested in opening up.
Funny how things change, eh? :-P
Actually, I doubt NVidia has changed its position by very much. They're probably making a smart business decision and ensuring that they ride the wave of Intel's hype. If Intel *does* succeed in convincing the market that Raytracing is the future, NVidia will be ready to compete rather than cede the market.
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Al Gore would like to have a word with you about just how important it is to beat photo-realistic hookers to death.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The kind with a star next to his name, obviously.
How about they focus instead on correcting the issue with their mobile chipsets which they are studiously avoiding making right with any of the people who have had issues.
I had a tenant once, who stated that the first use of any new multimedia technology was always for, shall we say, *adult* services. In the sense they drove DVD sales (multi viewpoint, stop rewind), CGI, and so on.
gah. the mind boggles what the animation crowd could do with this.
On a similar note, when I did my BA years ago my dissertation was on the veracity of digital images, when there is no real referent to accompany the photograph, and the loss of credibility of images in the onslaught of photo realistic fakes.
Well, it was inevitable that technology would catch up and we will no doubt need to add "video realistic" to our dictionary as well.
Just give me silver halide and call me a Luddite.
The devil is in the details. Ray tracing with glossy surfaces is relatively easy. But if you want to simulate real-world textures like orange-peel, bark, hair, or skin, things can really slow down.
It takes a lot of CPU power to raytrace at that level, and hey, what's that Intel is selling?
I just looked at those pictures and then checked a high res shot of Gran Turismo 3 Prologue on a PS3:
http://o.aolcdn.com/gd-media/games/gran-turismo-5-prologue/playstation-3/22.jpg
I don't see enough of an improvement to increase GAMEPLAY in any significant way. The reflection maps and shadows that are created by the current rasterization tricks are good enough that you suspend disbelief.
I'd much rather the increase in GPU power be used through a GPGPU API for artificial intelligence, advanced physics simulations, fluid dynamics, flocking behavior or other things which could really add to gameplay.
A few extra reflections and slightly softer shadows???? I won't even notice and neither will the average gamer.
I love this company. Always moving ahead.
Story submitted: 11:00am. Your post submitted: 11:00am. There's just no way in hell you formulated a response and typed out all of that in less than a minute. So just what kind of douchebag are you, anyway?
Uh, maybe he looked at the story on the firehose.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
...there's still no dirt. I wont be impressed till I see some grime build up on a fender in realtime.
Of course ray tracing, or one of its decendants, like photon mapping, will end up dominant. The question is when. Ray tracing is used now for rendering movies like Cars, which are probably pretty much state of the art for computer graphics, and would be used for things like PC games except that is so computationally expensive.
As to when rasterization will be replaced, the short answer is not any time soon. The article's title is misleading. It says "Intel: Rasterisation will be replaced in five years", while Intel's ray tracing guru Daniel Pohl actually says "Looking ahead five to ten years from now, I believe that rasterisation will be used less and less in games". Big difference there.
So, I think this will progress quickly, but we won't be getting rid of rasterization any time soon.
You missed birchbark canoes, the Trailer Park Boys, real beer, Timmy's, the CBC, and back bacon eh?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
this looks pretty nice, and its cool that nvidia are working on getting ray tracing methods down to an acceptable level of processing... but the problem i can see with this.... everything within all those images looks like its made from the same plastic that samsung tvs are made out of... everything is... TOO reflective.
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The article mentioned something about Intel doing this with a Quake 3 engine. I remember seeing some guys who built their own GPU using a FPGA that did hardware ray tracing using a modified version of the Quake 3 engine when it first went open sourced. They couldn't do anything real time because of the speed restrictions of an FPGA but I remember it looking as good or better than this. Good to know that the professional hardware developers are finally catching up with the hobbyists.
I want NVIDIA to come out with a card that gives boring DOOM clones intriguing plots and compelling gameplay.
Meanwhile reader arcticstoat passes on Intel's latest claim that rasterisation will die out the next few years, possibly in favour of ray tracing.
I'd love that to happen.
But reality is that several best games I have played were ... 2D.
Intel, Good luck adding RT to 2D graphics. ;)
RT in my experience is rather expensive - on end of development. Not all games manage to exploit all lighting models. And RT needs that even more than actual 3D graphics. It would take some long time for games to adopt it. On side of CADs picture is much simpler: they are easy to fork $$$ for good and fast rendering.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Like someone said a few months back, now all the games will be composed entirely of shiny balls, toruses, and checkerboards.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Actually, I think that the biggest problem with animated porn isn't texturing-vs-raytracing, but the models and animations. Last time I ran into some adult Poser-fu, it looked all wrong in a massively uncanny-valley way, and not because of the texturing.
And with the animations, well, I'd assume it's actually easier and cheaper to find a gal who'll bounce on a cock for half an hour for a few (thousand) bucks, than a highly skilled artist and animator who'll make that look natural.
Plus, raytracing is IMHO entirely the wrong secret sauce there. Ray tracing works best for sharp, metallic/mirror reflections. Because then you can take each ray and reflect it as one ray. If you want to go diffuse, that's a lot more expensive with ray-tracing. Then you need to split each ray into sub-rays that reflect into slightly different directions from there. Same as anti-aliasing is done by calculating sub-pixels, basically.
I.e., ray tracing looks grrreat and is the cheapest for shiny cars, crystal cups, and the like. Which is why everyone ray-traces cars and the like. It sucks for something like human skin, unless, of course, you want to make those humans look like polished shiny plastic dolls.
So, well, I can't imagine that much need for it in porn at the moment. Unless, of course, you want to make a Transformers sex movie. Or maybe one with liquid- metal Terminators fucking. (Hey, they must have made some female versions too, right?;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Slusallek's RPU was doing real-time raytracing with about the same hardware as Rage Pro, three years ago.
They could afford to put a couple of souped up RPUs in the corner of a GPU without noticing the "lost" transistors and get this kind of real-time raytracing on entry-level GPUs *today*.
This is just Nvidia saying to Intel "If you think you can get ahead by your claims of ray tracing being the only future we'll show you we can do ray tracing and not only compete with you but we will crush the Larrabee GPU."
I think raytracing is going to be the only way to go in 5-10 years. As poly counts go up, average poly size is going to drop below 1 pixel, and the overhead of tracing rays will match the overhead of rasterizing tiny polys + scene overdraw, etc. Of course, what I fear is that all the games will start feature too much reflection on every surface, because they can.
You're just sore that you didn't get to annoy a lot of people with your frist post or gnaa rubbish.
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I wonder how much control future ray tracing engines will give the programmer over scene search algorithms? If I'm doing a top-down terrain render, I'd want to have a super-simple O(C) first hit time (probably using a simple grid/bucket). If I were doing a space scene, maybe an oct tree. In either case, it sounds like a problem that can't easily be hardware accelerated.
Maybe will be possible to play Crysis now
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I wonder if this is what Pete Shirley went to NVIDIA to do.
The article and some of the comments here have oft-repeated myths about ray tracing. For example, ray tracing algorithms are generally simpler than rasterization algorithms, not more complex--though they do require more processing power.
One commenter said this demo was limited to 3 rays per pixel. That may not be true. The article said each ray was limited to 3 bounces. That doesn't preclude firing multiple primary rays per pixel for antialiasing. From the images, though, it doesn't look like there's much antialiasing.
I'm also disappointed to read that it's still done with bajillions of polygons. One potential advantage of ray tracing is rendering smooth, curved surfaces. Few of the real-timers seem to attempt this though. Too bad, the savings in memory for the model could improve the transform and rendering times.
That, and he's a subscriber.
I dunno. I just read a shareholder update from a privately held startup that I happen to know the real stories behind. That post sounds a LOT like it... enough spin to make you dizzy.
Not that the screen shots aren't pretty, but they're not revolutionary (yet).
http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadroplex_s4.html
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
Why a demo a Volkswagon?! That Volkswagon Veyron is not even good looking in real life... :(
And this systems costs how much? And consumes how much power? And needs how many P/S's to operate?
They may have put on a desktop what it took a supercomputer to do before, but it's still a very expensive desktop, which makes it interesting, but hardly useful to 99% of us.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Um, he's fucking Batman. He can do all kinds of stuff.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
...of the card that will be needed to run raytracing.
I guess you micro form factor guys are kinda screwed.
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I'm so impressed at these INTERACTIVE SCREENSHOTS. Wow, I can look at them and they... uh, they look back at me?
Show us the video or go home. We've all seen raytracing before as still images.
This is barely ray tracing. Hard shadows.
They've limited the ray bounces to only 3 to get the 30 fps performance. Real ray tracing requires many ray bounces to achieve realism. Hollywood films have 400+ ray bounces per pixel. This is a heavily constrained demo to achieve decent performance on a $10K+ system. Nice try Nvidia.
The whole point of ray tracing is to be able to model anything and how light interacts with it. Surely they mean the -equivalent- of that many polygons.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/07/1659250&from=rss
Quite a change in 5 months. Ray tracing is the way it should be done. No more hand coding reflections and shadows.
Speaking of Ray Tracing...
Check out this video showed at SIGGRAPH this week of the University of Virginia Rome model being ray traced in real time by a Cell Blade:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZnbMWy9A0Y
Nifty!
FUNK!
I'd rather be fucking Rachel Dawes. Well, not now anyway. I never was into the necrophilia thing.
Is anybody else saddened by this horrible sneaking invasion of crappy HD resolution as the benchmark for renderers? I mourn for the loss of display resolution progress. Have people forgotten 2560x1600? Has anybody else noticed that 1200 vertical pixels has become vanishingly rare in monitors? If this is the future as brought to us by LCD panels, I'm really really not liking it. They blur and smear when things move fast, pixels go dead on them all the stinking time, and HD TV is crippling resolution because Joe Sixpack (and presumably corporate America) has no idea why more pixels is better.
You can pry my 21" flat Trinitron CRT from my cold dead hands.
These screenshots look worse than many games that are already shipped and available on consoles. Raytracing has it's uses, but unless you just want a plastic looking car on a plastic road in a plastic city, there are better approximations of lighting already available that are more efficient.
You guys realize that the system being demoed here, the NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing System, with 4 next-generation Quadro GPUs, starts at $10,750, right? http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1218520087945.html
i would have loved to see this hardware render the 10 second coke bottle clip in 'a bugs life'. IIRC that scene cost as much (in render time) as the rest of the movie on account of it being ray-traced. how many millions might Pixar save by moving to this?
I'm curious... what other than ray tracing could replace rasterisation?
LONG LIVE VOXELS!
> But reality is that several best games I have played were ... 2D.
Damn right. And you know what capability I would really like to have on a card? Masked blit. That is the single most time-consuming operation on all 2D games. If you could copy all your tiles to the video card memory and then maskblit them onto the visible page (or blit and flip if it's too slow), that would really make 2D games smooth as silk and leave more CPU power for AI and real gameplay.
He lives in a different timezone, of course.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
Without video, it's hard to know what they mean by "fully interactive". (Perhaps someone who saw the demo at siggraph can enlighten me.) Do they mean, interactive framerates with static geometry and a moving camera? Or do they actually move the geometry around in the scene? From the screenshots, I would guess that maybe the car moves and not much else. If that's the case, it's a impressive demo, but it doesn't address one of the hardest problems, which is how do you re-arrange the acceleration structures when anything moves?
A good implementation of BIH ought to be able to handle a few thousands or tens of thousands of independently moving objects at reasonable framerates, but traversal costs are usually a bit higher than a SAH-based kd-tree. High frame-rates are neat, but if they had to spend an hour or two to generated an optimized tree, then their accomplishment is a little less impressive. (Which isn't to say that it's not impressive at all.)
Why on earth do websites like this on insist on using Javascript instead of a normal href when you click on the images? It's like the last 5 years of tabbed browsing have passed these guys because it will only open the larger images in a new window, rather than a new tab. Way to go guys. Welcome to 2003.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The "3 casts" is actually "3 bounces" in the article. It has nothing to do with anti-aliasing or shadows.
They are talking about how many surfaces a single ray can refract through or reflect off of.
With no bounces, you get no reflections.
With one bounce, you can see the reflection of the room in a mirror.
With two bounces, you can see the room reflected in a chrome sphere viewed in a mirror.
With three bounces, you can see a tiny reflection of the mirror on the surface of the chrome sphere that is seen through the reflection of the mirror.
With four bounces.. well you get the idea.
Three is good enough so you would have to look REAL close to notice the limited reflections unless you loaded up CHROME_WORLD.WAD on your server.
I just feel the need to share. I was looking up the tech specs in wikipedia on raytracing and came across this. I suppose this is what is possible and what raytracing will look like in the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Glasses_800_edit.png
Amazing
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Something that can run Vista and Duke Nukem Forever.
In real code you'd also have custom offset, clipping, and obsessive optimizations in the inner loop, but this is the gist of it. This makes color zero transparent, which is useful if you want to, say, draw a tree or the player sprite on top of your adventure game tile map.
I seem to remember an article on slashdot from not too long ago about someone doing real-time raycasting on ATI hardware... (looking, looking... Can't find the slashdot post, but I did find it mentioned in an article...):
"Watch out, Larrabee: Radeon 4800 supports a 100% ray-traced pipeline using DirectX 9":
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38145/135/
Btw, the article actually mentions that the code works on nvidia hardware too, but that the lack of a tesselation unit makes it slower.
If you look around for the guy behind it (Jules Urbach), you'll also find a number of youtube videos where the guy explains the tech and shows some demos.
I'm not working with graphics myself, so I can't really tell if the tgdaily link is equivalent to what nvidia are showing off in this story, but if we look at the statement...