With 8 Cards, Wolfenstein Ray Traced 7.7x Faster

An anonymous reader writes "As Slashdot readers know Intel's research project on ray tracing for games has recently been shown at 1080p, using eight Knights Ferry cards with Intel's 'Many Integrated Core' architecture. Now a white paper goes into more detail, documenting near-linear scaling for the cloud setup with 8 cards, and gives details on the implementation of 'smart anti-aliasing.' It will be interesting to see how many instances of Intel's next MIC iteration — dubbed Knights Corner, with 50+ cores — will be required for the same workload."

Comments

Re:Nice scaling

[root_42]

The problem with these demos is, they use ray tracing like we did in 1980 (i.e. Whitted style). All computations are highly coherent and efficient. As soon as you want to have more natural rendering, with diffuse illumination etc. Parellization doesn't scale proportionally anymore. Rays become heavily incoherent, memory access scatters and you get cache misses etc. So the real feat would have been if tey show 7.7x speed with diffuse global illumination.