pcper.com — As GPU and CPU power increases, real-time ray tracing is becoming more and more likely to be our rendering method of choice. This article takes a look at a custom made engine for both Quake 3 and Quake 4 that uses ray tracing for rendering as well as collision detection. Pictures and videos show off the impressive results!
Dec 18, 2006 View in Crawl 4
crustyoneDec 18, 2006
Now, if CAD work can put this to work, I'm sold.
masterofnoneDec 19, 2006
i don't know how to take seriously an article that begins with an error so blinding as to offer that LOTR image as ray tracing. There were plenty of rendered scenes in LOTR that used ray tracing... but that ain't one.
badgerouDec 19, 2006
@Peeps This could be real time in just a few years. A GPU that's only 3x more powerful than what's being used right now? That will be here before we know it. A CPU that runs at 36 GHz? Can't really get there now .... but one that runs 10x faster (performance wise) than what Intel has right now could be here in 5-10 years. Or maybe by then, everyone will have dozens of cpus in their desktop computer, and we'll be able to put this into a game. You're right that this is the academic view of real-time. As in, we'll be able to do this soon. If this guy (or rather, people like him) didn't do research like this, then 2-10 years from now, we won't be able to use these techniques in a real-time system (ie video games). A company can't usually afford to look that far ahead if the technology/method won't pay off (which, it may not, see donjaime's comment above), which is why we need academic research like this to explore these avenues before a company sinks big money into it.
ear1greyDec 19, 2006
as donjaime says - complexity - is key. when you fire a missile it becomes a lightsource, and an object that can be collided with. when something explodes into fragments, each of those fragments must be checked for collisions - and the explosion will no doubt be a particle system based light source, so the fire will look good - then if the fragments are reflective then the ray must continue, etc... the concept is lovely, and it will help keep nVidia et.al in clover for many years as they sell us (and re-sell us) the abililty to render a real ork, which has no convenient analog in reality. there comes a point where you have to take a breather and realise that when graphical utopia is reached, gameplay is still the killer difference, graphics are good enough today, gameplay, musculo-skeletal models, (pseudo) ai and haptic devices are what's going to make more of a difference over the next 20 years of gaming.
chaos386Dec 19, 2006
Maybe the actors were notified of that day's shooting via email, making them "computer generated"?
tungsaiDec 19, 2006
@UPSLynx>Ray Tracing really is the future for advanced photo-real graphics.I agree, the inevitable future is all raytracing.>Is it a long ways off? You betcha."Long ways"? 5-10 years is my guess.... not long at all!
pauldonnellyDec 19, 2006
No Peeps; you're lame for missing the point. Although current rasterizers are much faster than ray-tracing, they bog down considerably when a lot of geometry is added, while ray-tracers level off and don't take a big hit. So for todays games and yesterday's games our solutions are fine. For tomorrow's games we need something better suited for tomorrow's graphics.I thought someone in here had mentioned it already, but what I'm talking about is that ray-tracing copes exceptionally well with more geometry.
areallygoodnameDec 19, 2006
You still need to create objects with polygons in order to use raytracing.
bigp3rmDec 20, 2006
Here is the next gen game engine. I am very excited about this one.Engine in real time..<a class="user" href="http://download.nvidia.com/downloads/nZone/videos/project_offset_august2005_1280x720p.wmv">http://download.nvidia.com/downloads/nZone/videos/project_offset_august2005_1280x720p.wmv</a>Their website.<a class="user" href="http://www.projectoffset.com/">http://www.projectoffset.com/</a>Check out the other movies.
dominatusDec 20, 2006
Did you and all the people digging you up not read the article? He did talk about this, he increased a wall from 2 to 5000 polygons and only saw a slight drop in fps.