It's extremely unlikely that anything will go anywhere with raytracing in the near future. Raytracing takes a tremendous amount of power - apps that demonstrate it in realtime usually run quite choppy, and they're very minimalistic to boot; ugly textures, very simple geometry, very confined areas...
The main benefits of raytracing in games would be:
1) Shadows; they'd be Doom 3-like. Several games have full stencil shadows and that's just how raytraced ones would look: sharp and straight. The difference? Raytraced ones would take a ton more power and time to compute.
2) True reflection and refraction. We can "fake" this well enough - for example, see the Source engine's water, incorporating realtime fresnel reflections and refractions. Though Source's water's "fake" refraction/reflection aren't pixel-perfect, and are only distorted by a bump-map, it certainly looks great.
Honestly, considering the small gain in visual quality (although a major gain in accuracy) - it's like going after a fly with a bazooka. Sure, once we get to the point where there's enough processing power to deal with this well enough in realtime, it will happen - but don't expect it soon, and don't expect that huge a difference. Nicer reflections and refractions (which already look good today) and pixel-perfect shadows (looking just the same as stencil shadows in some newer games).
And I thought this was for computer mice. I could really use a depression-alleviating mouse to cheer me up while I stuff my face with chips and coke while playing CS all day. Thanks for nothing, science.:(
Isn't that enough of the "Because it's fat!" and "Because it's horny!" comments?
If I knew how to mod all of you "Redundant", make no mistake, I would!
Why would they show it if they didn't think it would work? Yes, it sucked, but it must have gone through *a lot* of testing before it got greenlit for a live demonstration.
"Hey, Bill, the voice recognition app is ready for us to demonstrate."
"Has it been tested in a wide variety of circumstances?"
"Yes, but it failed miserably. Let's demo it anyways."
"Sounds good!"
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It's extremely unlikely that anything will go anywhere with raytracing in the near future. Raytracing takes a tremendous amount of power - apps that demonstrate it in realtime usually run quite choppy, and they're very minimalistic to boot; ugly textures, very simple geometry, very confined areas...
The main benefits of raytracing in games would be:
1) Shadows; they'd be Doom 3-like. Several games have full stencil shadows and that's just how raytraced ones would look: sharp and straight. The difference? Raytraced ones would take a ton more power and time to compute.
2) True reflection and refraction. We can "fake" this well enough - for example, see the Source engine's water, incorporating realtime fresnel reflections and refractions. Though Source's water's "fake" refraction/reflection aren't pixel-perfect, and are only distorted by a bump-map, it certainly looks great.
Honestly, considering the small gain in visual quality (although a major gain in accuracy) - it's like going after a fly with a bazooka. Sure, once we get to the point where there's enough processing power to deal with this well enough in realtime, it will happen - but don't expect it soon, and don't expect that huge a difference. Nicer reflections and refractions (which already look good today) and pixel-perfect shadows (looking just the same as stencil shadows in some newer games).
And I thought this was for computer mice. I could really use a depression-alleviating mouse to cheer me up while I stuff my face with chips and coke while playing CS all day. Thanks for nothing, science. :(
Isn't that enough of the "Because it's fat!" and "Because it's horny!" comments? If I knew how to mod all of you "Redundant", make no mistake, I would!
Why would they show it if they didn't think it would work? Yes, it sucked, but it must have gone through *a lot* of testing before it got greenlit for a live demonstration. "Hey, Bill, the voice recognition app is ready for us to demonstrate." "Has it been tested in a wide variety of circumstances?" "Yes, but it failed miserably. Let's demo it anyways." "Sounds good!"