Rendering Games with Raytracing Will Revolutionize Graphics

[Salvator]

PC Perspective - Rendering Games with Raytracing Will Revolutionize Graphics

Ray tracing is heavily compute bound, but a new Intel employee is hoping that Intel's new hardware and his team's new software will soon bring ray tracing to the gamer for real-time, high resolution applications.

As it turns out, because of the way raytracing scales with the resolution of the screen, future handheld devices that succeed the likes of the Sony PSP or Nintendo DS could use raytracing as well.

The team at Intel estimates that within 2 years or so, the hardware will exist that will allow "game quality" ray tracing on a desktop machine. That means that in that timeframe we might see a fully raytraced game engine (though probably from a team like one at Intel).

[spudmonkey]

This article looks like more of an advert for Intel than anything as there are already game engines that do this kind of thing, including some that are capable of GI effects. Still, it's good to see a chip company looking at it too, rather than just a game dev house

[Salvator]

checkout the videos of Quake 3 been Ray Traced - pretty cool! [under downloads section]

http://www.q3rt.de/

[spudmonkey]

Sorry, but I'm actually less impressed having seen the videos. Using a 20 server cluster as a raytracing GPU is fine as a proof of concept, but the reality of a dedicated GPU for raytracing is less exciting than dedicated processors for physics and the like which add to the realism in game play. Also, the idea of a GPU that is 3 times the power of the 20 server cluster is all well and good, but the manufacture and heat control of such a GPU would perhaps prove prohibitive in terms of the cost to the consumer.

I'm happy to be proved wrong though!