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.

Comments

What a waste of resources

[rogerbo]

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.

Re:What a waste of resources

[jamie]

I kind of assumed the big win was that game development gets easier. If your game is rendered by ray-tracing can't you spend more time on building the models, lighting and gameplay and less on fine-tuning rendering tricks?

Re:Beautiful

[ChronoReverse]

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, but when?

[MojoRilla]

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.

Re:Beautiful

[Austerity Empowers]

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.

Re:That's a nice canned post ya got there

[jacquesm]

You're just sore that you didn't get to annoy a lot of people with your frist post or gnaa rubbish.