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Ray tracing videos – the future of gaming?
Intel reckons we’ll be seeing games using ray tracing in two to five years, which could make the traditional GPU obsolete
While we were at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), we got the chance to catch up with professional ray-tracer, Daniel Pohl, as well as his new pals at Intel.
The guys at Intel have put a hell of a lot of work into optimising the code for ray-tracing, and they even demonstrated a demo of Quake running at 1,280 with a super-smooth frame rate of 100fps using two quad-core Clovertown CPUs. In fact, Jim Hurley, senior principal engineer at Intel’s microcomputer graphics laboratory, even told Custom PC that he expects to see games using ray tracing ‘in two to five years,’ which could potentially revolutionise the PC gaming industry as we know it today.
Currently, Intel’s ray-tracing setups rely on stacks of parallel processing, with several Xeon machines connected together with 1Gb Ethernet cables. There’s no GPU involved in the 3D process, as there’s no rasterisation to achieve. There are no shadow maps or reflection maps, either, because all of the lighting effects are achieved by following a ray of light from the perspective of the screen’s viewer, and then calculating its effect on every pixel on the screen.
This affects everything from reflections to shadows and even collision detection, and it means that you can actually achieve effects such as infinite reflections from standing in between two mirrors, as well as truly accurate shadows. When we’ve all got 16-core machines, games that look like the Quake 4 demo in the videos below could start to become a reality. Plus, this focus on ray-tracing also helps to explain why Intel is looking intently at performing high-end graphics using ‘highly-parallel’ processing on products such as Larrabee.
We plan to look in to ray tracing in more depth at a later date, but in the meantime feast your eyes on these amazing videos of the Quake 4 conversion that we filmed from the demo rig at IDF.
