Ask Slashdot: How Did Real-Time Ray Tracing Become Possible With Today's Technology?

dryriver writes: There are occasions where multiple big tech manufacturers all announce the exact same innovation at the same time -- e.g. 4K UHD TVs. Everybody in broadcasting and audiovisual content creation knew that 4K/8K UHD and high dynamic range (HDR) were coming years in advance, and that all the big TV and screen manufacturers were preparing 4K UHD HDR product lines because FHD was beginning to bore consumers. It came as no surprise when everybody had a 4K UHD product announcement and demo ready at the same time. Something very unusual happened this year at GDC 2018 however. Multiple graphics and GPU companies, like Microsoft, Nvidia, and AMD, as well as other game developers and game engine makers, all announced that real-time ray tracing is coming to their mass-market products, and by extension, to computer games, VR content and other realtime 3D applications.

Why is this odd? Because for many years any mention of 30+ FPS real-time ray tracing was thought to be utterly impossible with today's hardware technology. It was deemed far too computationally intensive for today's GPU technology and far too expensive for anything mass market. Gamers weren't screaming for the technology. Technologists didn't think it was doable at this point in time. Raster 3D graphics -- what we have in DirectX, OpenGL and game consoles today -- was very, very profitable and could easily have evolved further the way it has for another 7 to 8 years. And suddenly there it was: everybody announced at the same time that real-time ray tracing is not only technically possible, but also coming to your home gaming PC much sooner than anybody thought. Working tech demos were shown. What happened? How did real-time ray tracing, which only a few 3D graphics nerds and researchers in the field talked about until recently, suddenly become so technically possible, economically feasible, and so guaranteed-to-be-profitable that everybody announced this year that they are doing it?

Comments

Smaller transistors

[Anonymous Coward]

What else has changed in the last half century? We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Airplanes still look, act, and sound the same as in 1969 when the 747 first flew. Cars, houses, clothes, buildings, roads, food, all more or less look the same.

Only processing information has gotten better by orders of magnitude, because information is massless.

So while you whittle your life away playing stupid games, just remember than none of the Space Age fantasies are ever going to become real.

But you have nice games and cordless vacuum cleaners.

Re: Smaller transistors

[Anonymous Coward]

Cars dont have carburetors and run for 100,000 miles with essentially no maintenance beyond wear components. My guess is you never owned a car before the 80s to have any idea how much things have changed.

Re:Smaller transistors

[hipp5]

We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Airplanes still look, act, and sound the same as in 1969 when the 747 first flew. Cars, houses, clothes, buildings, roads, food, all more or less look the same.

They still look roughly the same because that's a pretty good geometric design. But that doesn't mean they are the same. There have been huge advances in aviation technology over the past 50 years. For example, the average fuel burn of new commercial jets fell 45% between 1968 and 2014. Modern jets have better engines and are made of modern materials (carbon fibre is becoming more and more common). This means cheaper prices and longer distances for direct flights.

Buildings certainly do not look the same. New homes in the '60s were usually 1100 SF or smaller (at least in my area). Compare that to new homes now that are 2000 SF, much more efficient, and have a lot more modern conveniences. Now they're not filled with asbestos and lead paint.

And I could go on and on with food, clothing, and the rest.

Raster 3D Graphics seem to be tapped out

[rsilvergun]

Remember the jump from the SNES/Genesis to Playstation/Saturn? How about the first time you saw a Dreamcast game? Those were big leaps. But PS2 to PS3? If you'd been paying PC games you'd seen stuff on par with PS3. And PS3 to 4 was hardly a leap at all.

The trouble is modern graphics have gotten _hard_ to make. Pixel shaders are a bitch. They're too labor intensive. What's needed is something that lets you do great graphics with less man hours and fewer bugs. If ray tracing isn't gonna do that then it might as well be PC's answer to 3D TVs. Especially if it's only kicking out 30 FPS.

Re: Someone's cheating

[sound vision]

Nvidia makes custom hardware to play raster games too. They call them "video cards". I hope they can cheat the ray tracing right into my computer.

Re:Sinple

[arglebargle_xiv]

Simple: Hardware got more powerful.

Simple: Graphics card vendors required some new buzzword to sell their most expensive hardware.