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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 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.
What on earth? How are those overly shiny objects beautiful in any way?
The technology is probably better than that but the actual screenshots are distinctly ugly for this day and age.
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.
Intel's last demo was running on 8 GPUs wasn't it? On those were GPUs designed for ray tracing I thought.
I like Nvidia's approach to use existing architecture, and I agree with the poster above who says this is a much better method for consumers.
I disagree however with Intel saying rasterization is dying any time soon. Intel and Nvidia can't produce these effects with reasonably priced hardware, and even when the hardware becomes affordable, we still need games designed for this, and then a few years for the technology to be accepted by the masses.
I say rasterization sticks around 3-5 years.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Umm, no. I admit it's been a while, so my memory may be off, but I distinctly recall that procedural textures in ray-tracing are really, really easy, and add almost no (necessary) overhead to speak of. If you can find a way to do those things you mentioned with a procedural texture (those cases you provided are the textbook examples of how to do procedural textures, mind you) then you can almost certainly do them easily and cheaply. Any graphics course will have you rendering textured oranges inside the first week of the ray-tracing portion. Rainbowed CD undersides and the cool microscopic rings on the underside of a brass pot the day after that.
I don't remember the implementation details, as it's been many years since I tried, but it's easy, and doesn't add any real overhead to speak of. Yes, when running procedural textures, you CAN make them heavy (it's a procedure: it'll do whatever the hell you want) but by no means is that a requirement.
Which do you think is worse:
Not to mention that if anything even close to the support given to the current texture models is given to procedural texture models, they will almost instantly outpace the current options and limitations.
Did you ever notice that the early-generation ray-tracers supported procedural textures long before they supported the "regular" texturing model? There's a reason for that.
-G
P.S. Yes, I'm fully prepared for nit-picking you-used-the-wrong-word-here responses, so fire away. :P
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
I think if you look closely you'll see that they used materials very sparingly. The man behind the curtain (IMO) is that they're dedicating all their GPU and memory bandwidth to ray tracing computations, at the expensive of traditional raster manipulations.
Who cares? Well, I think if you're playing a game where you are free to run where you like, you may care.
I agree, nVidia is showing that ray tracing doesn't scare them at all. And when it's ready to happen, it will. I disagree that it's ready to happen any day now.
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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Yeah, exactly...it's like Web2.0 of the graphics world....sure, the buttons are shiny, but that doesn't make them look any better. That is why people like John Carmack have suggested that full on ray tracing isn't the way to go.
I absolutely do not understand the issue fully, but here is my take: in the early 90s, ray traced graphics looked way better than anything else. You could render a ball and people would say, "wow, that is so cool!" it took 30 minutes to render, but it could be done.
Since then, 3D rasterization has come a long way. With texture mapping, commodity 3D graphics hardware, pixel shading, alpha blending, etc, we have games that look really, really good, without ray-tracing.
Now ray-tracing is starting to become possible in real time, and I guess people are remembering how good it looked in the 90s and thinking it must still be the holy grail of graphics. In theory it's a good idea, render everything the way real light does.
The ultimate question has to be: does it look better? Or is there another way we can use that processing power that will make the graphics look even better? My guess is that ray-tracing is a technique that will be useful in some ways, and will be mixed with techniques we already have now. Much like today we use 2D texture maps on 3D objects, and it looks good.
Qxe4
From what I understood (correct me if I'm wrong!), the movie 'cars' was actually done using a ray tracer, which for pixar was a first.
As for the comments wrt picture quality, yes, I agree with all the comments, but there is some stuff there that would be pretty hard to copy with a rasterizer, and I would expect the quality to dramatically improve if/when they decide to pursue this further.
The impressive thing is not really how well the pig dances, at this stage the impressive thing is that the pig dances at all.
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