The only true path of future gaming; Raytracing

[Obsoleet]

I'd agree 1000x this, but notice he said pure ray tracing. Hybrid engines have been addressed in this thread and are possible. Likely something that HSA could excel at.

 

[antef]

So then you are just asking why dont we see hardware manufactures building hardware for a very very limited market? I suppose the answer would be that its due to the market being very very small. There are applications that use ray tracing sure, but hardware manufactures get more out of investing in other areas than R&D on ray tracing hardware.

I suppose that's a reasonable answer...I was thinking the market that already uses ray tracing in their applications is bigger than "very very small." All movie and special effects studios, all 3D and CAD designers...I imagine there's a lot of firms that would pay big money to speed up those operations if special hardware like what Imagination is building provided it. Perhaps things like NVIDIA OptiX or beefy Xeons are "good enough." But it really seems like the right hardware could enable a lot of new applications. Gaming graphics really have stagnated, I wish AMD or NVIDIA would get more behind this.

 

[exar333]

Is this a necro thread form 1997?

 

[Mondozei]

First, we had desktop-based architectures getting ported to mobiles. Then we had scalable architectures. Now we have mobile-first architectures.

I wouldn't be surprised to see that a lot of the advancements we think will come to desktop GPUs first could probably end up in stuff like the PowerVR series or Apple's GPUs or Qualcomm's Adreno first and then we'll get support for it on desktop. We're not quite there yet, but we will be if the trends continue in this direction.