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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.
I want NVIDIA to come out with a card that gives boring DOOM clones intriguing plots and compelling gameplay.
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.
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