Real-Time Ray Tracing : Holy Grail or Fools' Errand?

Friday 12th October 2007, 10:10:00 AM, written by Dean Calver

With Intel making noise about acceleration of real-time ray tracing in recent months, especially where it concerns future hardware they're working on, DeanoC found himself a little puzzled as to why.

Pitting real-time Whitted RT vs traditional real-time rasterisation, Deano's article compares the two approaches to see where the pros and cons of each approach lie. Should we be hailing our future shiny ball overlords, or does recent RT chatter need a bit more to back it up?

Have a read and find out!

Discuss on the forums

Tagging

b3d ± deanoc, whitted, ray, tracing, rasterisation


Latest Thread Comments (173 total)
Posted by Simon82 on Wednesday, 06-Aug-08 19:53:47 UTC
Quoting Arun
And I expect ARM to kill x86 within 2 to 3 years and Intel to go bankrupt in the same timeframe. Next?
The MMX technology that would change the world since Pentium (TM) firstly appeared on the market. :lol: ?

Posted by thambos on Sunday, 17-Aug-08 11:54:35 UTC
Nvidia demos real-time GPU ray tracing at 1,920 x 1,080 (http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/604656/nvidia-demos-real-time-gpu-ray-tracing-at-1920-x-1080.html)
nVIDIA's got a demo at Siggraph running on 4 Quadro GPUs (1GB each) in what they've dubbed the Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing System (starting at only $11,000 to anyone interested lol)

nVIDIA: "the ray tracer shows linear scaling rendering of a highly complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application."

Posted by Joshua Luna on Sunday, 17-Aug-08 12:06:15 UTC
Quoting thambos
Nvidia demos real-time GPU ray tracing at 1,920 x 1,080 (http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/604656/nvidia-demos-real-time-gpu-ray-tracing-at-1920-x-1080.html)nVIDIA's got a demo at Siggraph running on 4 Quadro GPUs (1GB each) in what they've dubbed the Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing System (starting at only $11,000 to anyone interested lol) nVIDIA: "the ray tracer shows linear scaling rendering of a highly complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application."
Someone needs to use the same hardware and show what rasterising or a hybrid approach compares visually because those screenshots look very poor. Neat technology, definately has some uses, but as a mainstream consumer the end result is less than visually stimulating.

Posted by Arwin on Sunday, 17-Aug-08 12:45:15 UTC
Hey, it's a start. At some point hardware will be tailored more towards it. The future will still probably be in hybrid solutions for a very long time (I find what Gran Turismo is doing in terms of creating hybrid lighting approaches - even if they're restricted so far to garage views and such - is interesting here).

Posted by Scali on Sunday, 17-Aug-08 14:12:39 UTC
I think it's good that nVidia does a demo like this.
Intel not only wanted people to believe that raytracing is the future, but also that Larrabee is what you need to enter that future (and some hinting at x86 to trick people even more into thinking that Larrabee is something conceptually different from other GPGPUs).
nVidia just shows the obvious: Larrabee isn't going to be the only raytracer in town.

Posted by Arnold Beckenbauer on Sunday, 17-Aug-08 14:20:34 UTC
Quoting thambos
Nvidia demos real-time GPU ray tracing at 1,920 x 1,080 (http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/604656/nvidia-demos-real-time-gpu-ray-tracing-at-1920-x-1080.html)
nVIDIA's got a demo at Siggraph running on 4 Quadro GPUs (1GB each) in what they've dubbed the Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing System (starting at only $11,000 to anyone interested lol)

nVIDIA: "the ray tracer shows linear scaling rendering of a highly complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application."
Here are some words about this demo: NVIDIA Case Studies: Compute-Enabled Graphics (http://s08.idav.ucdavis.edu/luebke-nvidia-case-studies.pdf), Ray Tracing & Ray Marching (page 15)

My question: How many rays per pixel?

Posted by CarstenS on Sunday, 17-Aug-08 15:38:49 UTC
Quoting Arnold Beckenbauer
My question: How many rays per pixel?
I suppose you mean "on average"? Because there's way to many different types of pixel to answer this concisely with on number.

Posted by Arwin on Sunday, 17-Aug-08 22:17:24 UTC
I'm on my PS3 now so it's a bit trickier to copy and paste links, but there's a link to a presentation demoing realtime raytracing of a recreation of Rome on a stack of Q21 Blades (I think totalling 6 TeraFlops). Looked pretty good.

EDIT: here

YZnbMWy9A0Y

Posted by Kaotik on Tuesday, 26-Aug-08 03:01:24 UTC
I have no real knowledge on this, but on another forum (and the custompc link) I got the impression that the nVidia demo is infact 'hybrid' - only reflections, refractions and shadows are raytraced, the rest normal rasterized stuff?

Posted by Andrew Lauritzen on Tuesday, 26-Aug-08 06:21:06 UTC
Quoting Kaotik
I have no real knowledge on this, but on another forum (and the custompc link) I got the impression that the nVidia demo is infact 'hybrid' - only reflections, refractions and shadows are raytraced, the rest normal rasterized stuff?
They had a demo like that too, but the main demo they showcased was raytracing everywhere. My understanding is that this was done, ironically, because the graphics/CUDA interop speed is not yet where it needs to be ;)


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