Intel converts ET: Quake Wars to ray-tracing

[Sylvanas]

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Intel demonstrated ET: Quake Wars running in basic HD (720p) resolution, which is, according to our knowledge, the first time the company was able to render the game using a standard video resolution, instead of 1024 x 1024 or 512 x 512 pixels. Seeing ETQW running in 14-29 frames per second in 1280x720 has brought up our hopes for Intel's CPU architecture, since we do not believe that CPUs would deliver a similar performance when rasterizing graphics. For the record, the demonstration ran on a 16-core (4 socket, 4 core) Tigerton system running at 2.93 GHz.

The game itself was vastly expanded when compared to original title. Intel?s Daniel Pohl showed how the engine now shoots three million rays in all directions, enabling collision detection based on rays alone.

Also, during the conversion, some effects were integrated by default, even if they had not been planned. One of those effects was fog shadow on the floor and physically-correct refractions of water. If you ever dived into a swimming pool or sea and looked up, you could have seen that the world is distorted. Now, ET: Quake Wars has the very same effect.

An impressive part of demonstration was looking at glass surfaces. Glass now reflects the environment to the tiniest detail - no LOD trickery here. Seeing a 200-window portal was quite an impressive demonstration of a situation when you are shooting rays into the environment. Check out our gallery to get more detail on this demo.

The icing on the cake was that the game was actually demonstrated running on a 64-bit Linux operating system. Intel stated that with ray-tracing, the company now supports 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Linux and Windows operating systems. We'll see what will happen with Mac OS X support, but that should be on the cards as well.

This looks promising, I should think we may be seeing more of these demos come the time Larabee is getting close to release. What amazed me is the Linux support! If I can play these future RT games on Linux I'll have no need for handing over $$ to Bill every so often.

 

[n7]

Holy crap look at the water & the glass.

Wow :Q

 

[Andrew1990]

So this is all ran on the CPU or on Intel's new video card? I am a bit confused on this Ray Tracing thing. How is it better than what the current technology offers?

 

[Cookie Monster]

Read the bolded part. They used 16 core tigerton system @ 2.93 GHz, with 720p as their resolution. Looks very cool, but the system requirments to achieve such a feat is quite demanding. And thats an understatement!

 

[BFG10K]

No only that but there's probably no AA or AF either. This is just Intel trying to push multi-core again because they can?t directly compete with ATi or nVidia.

 

[n7]

Personally i think ray tracing is the future of gaming.

I will take a long time before it's a realistic option though.

Time will tell, but i think Intel has the right idea actually...

 

[Cookie Monster]

I think the combination of both is the future. So in a sense i agree with John Carmack's opinion on the future of 3d graphics and raytracing.

 

[Andrew1990]

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster
Read the bolded part. They used 16 core tigerton system @ 2.93 GHz, with 720p as their resolution. Looks very cool, but the system requirments to achieve such a feat is quite demanding. And thats an understatement!

I did, but it said it was running on 16 processors, it didnt say it didnt use a video card to render it.

For using the CPUs alone, it looks pretty good, but it seems that it has a lot to go before coming viable for even the Enthusiast.

 

[videogames101]

That looks like crap compared to real ray-tracing....

 

[CelSnip]

This demonstration is pretty impressive for something rendered in realtime. Comparing it with something prerendered is pointless.

By the time ray tracing is feasible for games though, GPUs are probably going to be superior at it.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Dang, that is some sweet looking glass / water....

 

[Red Storm]

The first thing I noticed in the screens was the FPS on the top right. As good as it looks, at 13fps it's more of a slideshow. But credit to Intel for pushing forward with this, I look forward to their graphics solutions in the near future.

 

[Foxery]

Here's the link to John Carmack's highly technical interview about the future (or lack thereof) of Ray Tracing back in March. As I recall, his view is that raytracing is neat, but rasterisation (what GPUs use now) has improved so much in recent years that suddenly asking every programmer and hardware developer to relearn their jobs is unnecessary.

As for the hardware requirements, it's intended to be an early tech demo for future products - possibly Larabee. The 4-way server was the closest they could get with currently available hardware.

Originally posted by: Andrew1990
I did, but it said it was running on 16 processors, it didnt say it didnt use a video card to render it.

There is no video card involved in the demo system - current GPUs do not support this type of instructions. The 16-way Tigerton is running this in "software mode." 6 months from now, the demo could be rerun on an 8 or 16-way Nehalem system for even smoother performance.

 

[ArchAngel777]

Originally posted by: Foxery
There is no video card involved in the demo system - current GPUs do not support this type of instructions. The 16-way Tigerton is running this in "software mode." 6 months from now, the demo could be rerun on an 8 or 16-way Nehalem system for even smoother performance.

True, but look at how much money that would cost?

But it is also true that 6 months from now this could be ran a high clocked, die shrunk GTX 280 under the normal renderiing mode with improved performance. If GPUs are stagnent and CPUs keep improving, I suppose it might take off. But for now, we would be at least 5 years from something like this taking off, probably even more.

 

[Nemesis 1]

I agree its going to be awhile befor we see games . If Nehalem and larrabee play really nice to gether as I suspect they will. When we see this demoed on a nehalem /larrabee set up this could knock your socks off. But still games take time . The other company that stands to have great success with raytracing Is AMD ATI Their arch is very good for this type of work. All ATI needs is Intels compiler and as I understand it they are working on that now together.

So This thing could happen in as little time as 2 years . As we all know intel bought Havok and raytracing is great for colllision detection . We also know ATI /AMD are using Havok.

Intel also bought a gaming company not to long ago. That was already developing agame I suspect they will try to raytrace this game . using hybred . But well see.

Had to add this. Now that AMD is getting this compiler look for both amd and intel to push MS to bring out a EPIC OS. AMDs future looks great.

 

[postmortemIA]

so they don't want to build video hardware, instead they are relying on CPU to do this basically in software mode... I don't want this.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Err... the water in the first picture looks like the water in Farcry to me. The water in the second looks like the water in 3DMark01. So Intel is trying to push trading a $300 video card that can run games at 60FPS at 1080P for their expensive multi core systems that can run 720P at 14-29FPS? I know the technology is very, very early, but I don't know what I'm supposed to be excited about I guess.

 

[Sureshot324]

I don't think ray tracing will ever be used in games. When you look at this example of ET: QW running at 13fps on a 16 core system, yes in a few years we may have consumer level hardware that can run that at 60fps, but in a few years games will be 10x more detailed than ET: QW!

Think of it like this. Would you rather play a game with Quake 2 level graphics WITH raytracing (already possible, google it), or Crysis level WITHOUT ray tracing? This won't change 10 years from now. Raytracing will always take many times more calculations than rasterization. There is no magic point where computers will be 'powerful enough' to run raytracing. The more polygons that games have, the bigger the performance penalty of ray tracing, and that CPU time will always be put to better use somewhere else.

 

[A554SS1N]

The graphics looked generally unimpressive to me :/ It might have had "fancy water effects" but they didn't look that great and the rest of the environment consists of relatively flat lighting and low res textures.