will ray tracing bring games back to cpu?

[draggoon01]

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=41858

8 cores, 4ghz = games with ray tracing?

 

[swtethan]

99% scaling is soo much better than Xfire or SLI

 

[MarcVenice]

what exactly is ray tracing ? It sounded nice, but I don't have a clue what it is and what it could mean for gamers 😛

 

[Arkaign]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing

I'd be interested to see what John Carmack would make of this.

Personally, I'd welcome the total abandonment of expensive and power-hungry dedicated GPUs.

 

[draggoon01]

Originally posted by: MarcVenice
what exactly is ray tracing ? It sounded nice, but I don't have a clue what it is and what it could mean for gamers 😛

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...c/Glasses_800_edit.png


aside from better graphics, the one big feature i read is that scene complexity doesn't scale linearly as it does with traditional graphics. if you double the number of objects on screen the number of rays needed doesn't double but stays about the same. so once we reach a threshold point that allows ray traced games, things should take off quickly.

 

[swtethan]

Originally posted by: Arkaign

Personally, I'd welcome the total abandonment of expensive and power-hungry dedicated GPUs.

I will gladly pay more for a cpu (say $400-500 for a cpu) if it means I dont have to buy a graphics card.

 

[Arkaign]

Originally posted by: swtethan

Originally posted by: Arkaign

Personally, I'd welcome the total abandonment of expensive and power-hungry dedicated GPUs.

I will gladly pay more for a cpu (say $400-500 for a cpu) if it means I dont have to buy a graphics card.

Definitely! And with a larger investment in your processor, you'll see bigger returns on general computing purposes (encoding/compiling/etc), that you don't get from GPUs unless you count certain very rare instances.

 

[MarcVenice]

How photo realistic was the ray tracing done by the yorkfield cpu? Theres various degrees if I understood the article right. It has to of course deliver graphics better then current software/hardware can. The cpu managed to make an image in realtime, using ray-tracing at a resolution of 768*768, right? If so, that's very promising I guess. If it scales 100%, 2 yorkfields could do 1280*1024 at slightly lower FPS.

Not sure if what draggoon sais is right though. From what I understood a pixel will be 'updated' if a ray hits something or doesn't hit something. When more objects appear in a scene, more pixels will have to be updated, esepecially because of reflections and such?

 

[Arkaign]

Interesting tidbit in the wiki :

"On March 16 2007, the University of Saarland revealed an implementation of a high-performance ray tracing engine that allowed computer games to be rendered via ray tracing without intensive resource usage."

Now that would be something, off to google!

EDIT: Cool

EDIT 2 : Cooler!

 

[speckedhoncho]

People wouldn't need to upgrade their GPU as much if multi-core/threading was used.

The 8800 is the beginning of GPGPU's with more GP instructions, but MMX & SIMD haven't been used as much in the past because of the lack of parallel processing that multiple pipelines in video cards have had for years.

Now that will change, especially since programs can (have to) control themselves which cores they use.

 

[Nemesis 1]

Ya ray tracing is a big deal . I was a little surprized by the news. But should have seen it. With all the enhancements Intel is doing to the Vectors units on Penryn.
As I stated befor tho the real surprize will come with Nehalem or Nehalem C . With larabbe on die.

here is a good read with excellant links for those who desire to learn more about Raytracing and vectoring on the up and coming Nehalem. I think if people would put 1+ 1 together you can see why AMD bought ATI.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/f...tor+processing+nehalem

 

[shadowofthesun]

Did anyone think an Intel demo using a pair of AMD GPU's was kind of weird?

I think raytracing would be nice. I use it in 3D modeling and it does allow for some pretty unique, spectacular affects. I personally think that before we see this in games, we'll see much more demanding and aggressive raytracing in CGI movies. Render times could be cut down to 1/10 of what they are today with that kind of rendering power!

 

[Piuc2020]

While this is pretty impressive it shows the CPU has enough juice to render a raytraced image at 768x768 at 90FPS... but does it have enough juice to run other calculations (AI, Physics, gameplay rules, damage and trajectory calculations, sound, etc)? I think the days of raytraced games using the CPU are still far far away.

 

[Wreckage]

Quake 3 and 4 have both been ported to ray tracing so it's very much possible to have games use this method.

 

[speckedhoncho]

Originally posted by: Wreckage
Quake 3 and 4 have both been ported to ray tracing so it's very much possible to have games use this method.

Quake 3 & Quake 4 use ray tracing? What do they use it for? Surface polygons? Lighting?

 

[Arkaign]

Originally posted by: Piuc2020
While this is pretty impressive it shows the CPU has enough juice to render a raytraced image at 768x768 at 90FPS... but does it have enough juice to run other calculations (AI, Physics, gameplay rules, damage and trajectory calculations, sound, etc)? I think the days of raytraced games using the CPU are still far far away.

Well, with 8 and 16-core CPUs on the horizon, it may be closer than we think. I think John Carmack could successfully ship a game with a ray-traced mode available for selection, similar to how he alone supported things like 3dnow for the K6-2/3, and a mode for Quake1 for Rendition Verite video chip, etc. ID has always been tops in the game business for supporting diverse and interesting technologies.