What is Digg?105 Comments
- AaronTyler, on 06/13/2008, -0/+54Here's the video:
http://www.pcghx.com/aid,646920/News/Video_shows_r ... - l0k0, on 06/13/2008, -8/+36The water is orgasmic, but then again, so is having sixteen freakin cores as your CPU.
- dafragsta, on 06/13/2008, -0/+27Water looks good, but there is nothing there to really show off soft shadows, caustics, or the rest of the goodness associated with raytracing. I'm sure it looks better in motion though.
- p3ngwin, on 06/13/2008, -0/+27***** sweet, it ran on a 4 socket/16 core system, but you just KNOW that intel is going to have some muscle for this system when Larrabee is finished.
physics, raytracing,etc all on increasingly general purpose programmable "processors" that can process data agnosticly .
that is, they can process any data type equally well, no more, fpu units, no more integer units, all units will be universally capable to process anything equally well.
just like the shaders in graphics cards are no longer biased towards vertex or pixel shading. they process BOTH datatypes equally well. - hugepedlar, on 06/13/2008, -0/+21Got a link to part two?
- Hassassin, on 06/13/2008, -1/+22This sounds really awesome, but the pics in the article suck.
- hugepedlar, on 06/13/2008, -0/+20*****, I remember leaving my Atari ST on for 12 hours overnight to raytrace a single image of a 3D Pacman. What will be possible in the next 15 years?
- inactive, on 06/13/2008, -1/+20That was the most impressive part actually.
- jacekpoplawski, on 06/13/2008, -3/+18From the article:
"The icing on the cake was that the game was actually demonstrated running on a 64-bit Linux operating system." - troub, on 06/13/2008, -1/+14The raytracing looks nice with the reflections and distortions, water, etc. You'd think, though, if they're trying to impress people, they could have at least used nicer textures. Regardless of the lighting, the low-poly models and low-res textures make these screenshots look like crap.
- pckbeta, on 06/13/2008, -1/+13For the non-graphics-dorks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing - dafragsta, on 06/13/2008, -0/+12Full sensory override. People will stop playing games and spend a lot of time on porn. Someone call Tracy Jordan and keep him ahead of the curve. We'll need a man of his true genius to leverage the might of this new porn revolution.
- recoilfx, on 06/13/2008, -0/+1116fps for REALTIME raytracing is awesome
- TheHim, on 06/13/2008, -0/+11Looking at all the humble attempts over the last years, i thought the day would never come. Now i'm confident raytracing will eventually see the light in common games. Even if it's a giant waste of resources, you can bet the industry is gonna jump on the bandwagon sooner or later for commercial reasons ("Oh so shiny and new").
Imagine having a ray-depth (early termination) slider in the graphics settings :) - spdorsey, on 06/13/2008, -4/+15Did anyone see the 16FPS tag on the monitor in one of the shots?
- hexydes, on 06/13/2008, -0/+11I would say they probably used the ETQW engine for three reasons:
1. The main research scientist has used id engines previously (starting with Quake 3, continuing with Quake 4).
2. id is known for being very generous with their engines, generally open-sourcing them after 3-4 years of being on the market (I'm sure for something like this they were very easy to work with to get the license without spending $500,000).
3. Intel ran this on Linux. Last time I checked, Crysis doesn't really run so hot on Linux. - japface, on 06/13/2008, -1/+12its impressive because raytracing in real time is hard to do at realistic frame rates because of the sheer amount of calculation a processor has to do for each frame.
- hexydes, on 06/13/2008, -0/+10The point here is that ray-tracing *IS* the best way to generate these images; it's just that at this point, computers aren't quite there yet. This isn't a product, it's a proof-of-concept research design, to show what could be coming down the line in 3-5 years.
What you just said would be akin to saying, circa 1990: "Who cares if you can draw a 3D rasterized environment? It's only going at 20fps and looks like crap. I'll take my 2D platform side-scroller, thanks!"
Technology moves fast, but it has to start somewhere. Give it another few years to catch up. - cwmather, on 06/13/2008, -1/+11I don't think that you people understand ray tracing is the same technology they use when making movies as it more naturally reflects how light and shapes are perceived in the real world. What use to take hours to render, can now be done on the fly. There is a glass ceiling when dealing with rasterization as there will always be "edges" and "jaggies" if you zoom in far enough. This is simply not the case with ray tracing. We have a long way to go, but this is proof that we are closer than we think to true Matrix-esque virtual reality.
- ortucis, on 06/13/2008, -1/+10Quake Wars isn't exactly known for it's high poly detailed models.. it's an MP game, it's more gameplay than graphics.
- ligyron, on 06/13/2008, -7/+15So this article is NOT about extraterrestrials, earthquakes, the war, and stingray tracking
- bundwallah, on 06/13/2008, -1/+9Thank you for putting that in plain english. Wow..16 cores for only 17fps? There must be some serious data crunching going on. I wonder how long until NVidia disses Intel by saying they could do it on a couple of GPU's. :)
- inactive, on 06/13/2008, -3/+11So because it took you 30 seconds to produce a single image of worse quality than these it makes it not impressive that Intel can generate some in under 0.05 seconds? Get real.
- Firehed, on 06/13/2008, -0/+8Yeah, every pixel is calculated - there's no weird trickery. Performance is terrible relative to raster graphics, but it also has theoretically infinite detail preservation with almost no performance difference.
- iloveliberals, on 06/13/2008, -0/+7Ray tracing benefits from more processors, and scales nearly linearly. It's nice to see progress with 16 general-purpose CPUs, but I see no reason why this couldn't be implemented in a GPU built for ray tracing, having 256 or more special-purpose (and very simplified) RISC processors. Anyone know of any companies experimenting with such an approach?
- NaziHatinChimp, on 06/13/2008, -1/+7No ***** that is almost playable if not playable.
- ortucis, on 06/13/2008, -1/+7"..your "best programmer in the world crown" is in jeopardy..."
Yeah, because the next-gen megatexture feature which will work on not only terrain but models in idTech 5 is being created by the underpant gnomes.. - RevEng, on 06/13/2008, -0/+6Actually, a GPU is better suited to the job than a general-purpose CPU. Ray tracing relies heavily on trigonometric functions and vector math -- two things that general-purpose CPUs are terrible at. Even with speedups like FPUs, MMX, and SSE, dedicated vector processors like those in GPUs are much more efficient and can be clocked much higher.
In any case, ray-tracing is both the most accurate and the most intensive way of calculating 3D-2D projections. You could call it naive, but it's also essentially the way it happens in the real world. - NaziHatinChimp, on 06/13/2008, -0/+6Could you imagine this be in game graphics?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Glasses_800_edi ... - inactive, on 06/13/2008, -0/+5I don't think you understand just how long it takes to create decent soft shadows in a ray-tracer. It's slow and years away from being real-time.
- mythicflux, on 06/13/2008, -0/+5I was amazed at his insights in overcoming the uncanny valley.
- RevEng, on 06/13/2008, -0/+5I don't think the point is that it's consumer ready; the point is that were getting close. As others have mentioned, ray-tracing generally takes minutes-to-hours for a single frame. Studios like Pixar use large computing farms to get timely results. The fact that Intel has a setup that can do 20-30fps at 1280x720 with a CPU that's not too far from what is commercially available is incredible.
Give it a few years and we'll be seeing this kind of computing power in the high-end desktop market. As with everything else in computing, it's just a matter of time. - illt, on 06/13/2008, -1/+6Don't forget both sides of the story.
John Carmack makes good key points that say otherwise.
He claims Intel's raytracing approach is conventional and needs new data types/structures before it becomes a viable solution.
As he says, right now and for the forseable future, rasterization is a better use of transistor count. Results speak for themselves. This beast machine could only pull 13fps
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=532&type=over ... - homercles337, on 06/13/2008, -2/+6This has nothing to do with art. The guy reprogrammed the graphics engine to use rays. By this fact, the new version will look better in terms of lighting, shadows, reflection, and refraction. The same 3D models are used. You really no clue what youre talking about.
- Shaflugi, on 06/14/2008, -0/+4Well, it's not like raytracing is gonna magically add new polygons and higher resolution textures. It's just a different and more realistically accurate method of drawing stuff on the screen.
- RevEng, on 06/13/2008, -0/+4Not to put the man down (he was a great programmer), but the ping utility is a very simple program. I had to make the equivalent of a command-line FTP client for a third-year university class and it took only a few hours, granted, I was using Python instead of C, but it was still all based on system-level socket calls. Not to mention, the version of ping you use now has seen many bug fixes and enhancements since his original implementation.
Still, he was a brilliant and accomplished programmer. It's unfortunate for society to have lost such a great contributor. - KungFuJ35u5, on 06/13/2008, -2/+6Sweet, it was running Linux.
- jerrycan, on 06/13/2008, -0/+4The clouds....They're the same as the bushes..... http://www.pcghx.com/?menu=browser&article_id=6469 ...
- RevEng, on 06/13/2008, -0/+4Yes, it would be nice to eliminate the need for dedicated GPUs, but it's not likely to happen any time soon. General-purpose comes at the cost of being poor at everything. While your CPU makes it great for everything from the OS, to physics calculations, to managing network protocols, GPUs are highly-efficient at doing graphics and that's what allows us to get even close to the detail we have now in games.
Try finding even a 5 year old game that can do software rendering and note how poor it performs even with new CPUs. It just isn't feasible. - Sirocco, on 06/13/2008, -1/+5You really have no clue at this point.
- illt, on 06/13/2008, -0/+4on quake 4......did you read the article?
I'm not bashing raytracing, i'm saying intel is investing a lot into this, and this is their promotional video.
It's great for certain effects and realism that normally cost a lot on rasterization hardware, but it has it's drawbacks too.
Anti aliasing is very expensive on raytracing at the moment for example. - byronm, on 06/13/2008, -0/+4Google raytracing & gpu and you can see thousands of projects already doing this. Sure, GPU's aren't currently aligned for raytracing precisely but the're probably more esily adapted in a higher core count than say an Intel CPU style unless intel plans on jumping to 192cores or more very quickly.
- ImpoliteAndEvil, on 04/06/2009, -0/+4If you think ray-tracing is overrated then you're an idiot.
- NaziHatinChimp, on 06/13/2008, -0/+4Micheal Muss, the guy who invented Ping, was studying Real Time Ray Tracing in Military applications until his untimely death in 2000. His page is terribly interesting if you are into this stuff.
http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/
He wrote Ping, THE ping, in one night. The story itself is great. Never knew it would take off like that.
I have see the video on his real time ray tracing integrated into video on the internet a few years back and if anyone can find it, please post it. - rossinio, on 06/13/2008, -0/+4They mostly come out at night.. mostly.
- nuvem, on 06/13/2008, -1/+5Every Pixar film you've seen is rendered using REYES, which minimizes the use of ray-tracing. Secondly, rasterization will not always result in jagged edges; the same sub-pixel techniques are used for both ray-tracing as well as rasterization.
For further reading, here's Carmack's take:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=532&type=expe ... - inactive, on 06/13/2008, -2/+5Pretty sure that slider will be on "1" for most people for a couple generations.
"this object is yellow"
"what? it's a mirror."
".... this object is yellow!" - Aquashark, on 06/15/2008, -0/+3i want fair marketing campaigns and better optimized games.
- RevEng, on 06/13/2008, -0/+3Not only that, but the liberal placement of mirrored spheres screams, "Look, ray-tracing is cool!" Though it's true that reflections are what makes ray-tracing shine, these arbitrary spheres make it look cheap and artificial. The window and water reflections are much more impressive.
- inactive, on 06/13/2008, -2/+5Is it just me or does ray-tracing automatically mean you'll see shiny balls in the game?
-
Show 51 - 100 of 106 discussions
The Digg Toolbar for Firefox lets you Digg, submit content, and keep track of Digg even when you're not on the Digg site. Download the official 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is 