Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced

An anonymous reader writes "After showcasing Quake Wars: Ray Traced a few years ago, Intel is now showing their latest graphics research project using Wolfenstein game content. The new and cool special effects are actually displayed on a laptop using a cloud-based gaming approach with servers that have an Intel Knights Ferry card (many-core) inside. Their blog post has a video and screenshots."

Comments

Re:Poor ray tracing

[Purity Of Essence]

1. It's extremely common in FPS games for the player model to be excluded from the player perspective. It really complicates things and usually doesn't look good without a lot of extra work.

2. That's not the car's shadow. The building shadow is the shadow you are seeing. You can't see the car's shadow because the car is mostly (if not entirely) shadowed by the building behind it. The viewing angles were not suited for showing a shadow cast by any directly illuminated portion of the car.

Re:The surveillance station. ...

[WhitetailKitten]

You wanna know the last game I played that featured this "surveillance camera" business?

Duke Nukem 3D


Ohhhh, snap!
/* OK, it was one monitor at a time, but that's arguably a tactical decision to not let the player see every camera at once */

Re:What's the point?

[TheRaven64]

Not quite. The complexity of rasterisation is (very) roughly O(number of polygons * number of lights). The complexity of ray tracing is O(number of rays). The number of primary rays is the number of pixels (sometimes multiplied by 4 or 9). The number of secondary rays depends on the number of lights (you fire a ray into the scene and then a secondary ray from what it hits to each light). This means that increasing the complexity of the scene does not affect the ray tracing time very much, but increasing the resolution does. On the plus side, ray tracing gives you shadows and reflections for free. It also degrades more gracefully - you can get a lower quality scene quickly (just from one primary ray per pixel) and then add the details from secondary rays and extra rays if the user doesn't move. In contrast, rasterisation tends to just lower the frame rate.

Re:Ahh Youth

[Sigma 7]

Duke Nukem 3D, while it did have surveillance, only had one screen. If you stopped watching the screen, it would render a blocky image for one of the cameras it monitors rather than a clear image.

It took until at least the Unreal Engine before a multi-screen display was possible, and I'm not sure how much that impacted the framerate.

Re:Project Offset

[Pharmboy]

but about every experienced game developer in the field (including me) realized that super-ambitious projects started by a handful of indies in a basement rarely makes it to the shelves nowadays.

There are some exceptions. Valve has a history of buying up these groups and hiring the original people. Day of Defeat, Portal, Team Fortress all started that way, and they have done the same with other small groups as well. One more reason I'm a fan of Valve, they buy talent and put them to work, giving them the opportunity to expand their original dreams.