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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.
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Did anyone think we'd have a Quad-Core CPU for £170 in 2007 Five year's ago ? (Which btw can run at 3.5Ghz, per core. Yes, I know it's 2x C2D's, but it is Quad-Core!!) You really think that by Intel's outside estimate of Five year's we won't have Computer's capable of these sort of power ? Get Real, We'll have Eight-Core in 2009! That's two year's alone. Sixteen-Core PC/Xbox/PS4 anyone ?
Comment by Pinhead at 6:49pm 28th September 2007
completly agree, ive been using ray tracing for a few years now in 3d modeling with programs like rhino and 3d viz, if they could get enough power from a single pc to render it real time at high res in 2 years i will be amazed, ray tracing takes some mental amounts of calculations and the graphics it can render are mind blowing, there is no game, console or film that comes close to the detail of image you get from using this, these videos dont do it any justice either. if you want to see it in full glory do a google image search for ray tracing and look at the pics.
Comment by MDK_UK at 9:32pm 27th September 2007
raytracing is the future, i've been intrested in the openrt project for while, and i would of thought that it would of made games cost less to develop as well, but 2-5 years? i dunno, i also don't know how microsoft will implement it's propiraty api, will it be a new directxrt or something? of will it be in directx11 etc?
Comment by g3RC4n2 at 10:29pm 26th September 2007
This is not 'just' some marketing ploy from Intel. Ray-tracing has been around for many moons. This was always going to be the future of 3D, it was just that consumer products have never had the power to utilise it. It is a more realistic way of presenting 3D environments, making them look, feel and behave more like reality. By the way, not all textures need to be shiny! I expect they have used such textures as they more accurately show off the lighting effects. After enough time has passed, it will happen. It wasn't that long ago that the idea of a separate card for 3D graphics seemed like a specialist option! ;)
Comment by Codex at 4:54pm 25th September 2007
2-5 years for the chip it will take 7 yr for people to be able to afford such a chip. which by that time gpu would moved incorporating real time physics have 4gb of gddr10 ram on board even dual.quad core gpu's. 16 cores intel are try to give people reasons to upgrade to such a chip.. that is all..
Comment by dmc_dc at 11:52am 25th September 2007
I feel like i've been flung back to the press release of the "Ultra 64"..........it looks the same as 15 year old Silicon Graphics!
Comment by Secondsight2 at 9:29am 25th September 2007
I feel like i've been flung back to the press release of the "Ultra 64"..........it looks the same as 15 year old Silicon Graphics!
Comment by Secondsight2 at 9:29am 25th September 2007
To be honest this doesnt look very impressive to me!?? Its just a shineey surface that reflects objects around it slightly distorting them as it moves. With some shader trickery the same type of thing could be possible on current shader based gpu's. In my book this is a bigger flop than Nintendos Virtual Boy!
Comment by halagaten at 12:21am 25th September 2007
i bet this will be some kind of gimmick that intel will somehow make only its cpu's do so if you want high tech graphics you must pay a premium AND you can only buy from intel
Comment by arm4g3don at 11:51pm 24th September 2007
the market takes care of itself. the market leaders layout "what the market wants" anyway. the companies with the money from successfully selling products (i.e. nvidia and intel) will have the r&d budgets to produce whatever is needed. Agree with yougotkicked. Several hundred ray-trace enabled stream processors could do the job equally well maybe. By then we might be upto 16 core main PC with a separately housed graphics box connected to it through a PCI express 5.0 slot. The graphics box contains cooling and power for eight 14000GTXs in SLI. (Will still probably struggle to run Crysis in Dirext X 10 mode)
Comment by JohnW at 10:59pm 24th September 2007
the market takes care of itself. the market leaders layout "what the market wants" anyway. the companies with the money from successfully selling products (i.e. nvidia and intel) will have the r&d budgets to produce whatever is needed. Agree with yougotkicked. Several hundred ray-trace enabled stream processors could do the job equally well maybe. By then we might be upto 16 core main PC with a separately housed graphics box connected to it through a PCI express 5.0 slot. The graphics box contains cooling and power for eight 14000GTXs in SLI. (Will still probably struggle to run Crysis in Dirext X 10 mode)
Comment by JohnW at 10:59pm 24th September 2007
i think that the several hundered stream procesors of dx10 gpu's could be re-designed to do this job much better than a multi core cpu, te calculations would probably be simple enough (relatively) but calculating it for every pixel in the game is what causes the need for multi core cpu's, and lets bear in mind that amd demonstrated an dual opteron system with two x1900xt's working as gpgpu's that was able to break the teraflop barrier. and nvidia + IBM seems more likely than VIA, ibm is bigger and i dont think they have a hand in the gpu world atm.
Comment by yougotkicked at 10:09pm 24th September 2007
Well Intel is already a giant, AMD and ATi have got together, so if nVidia needs to create a mixed CPU/GPU to do ray tracing then could a joint project with VIA be on the cards?
Comment by l3v1ck at 8:03pm 24th September 2007
could make current gpu\'s obsolete... Surely AMD&ATI/Nvidia know about this technology and will be future planning for it themselves if they think it\'s a viable platform for PC games. Especially Nvidia, they\'re not just going to turn around in 2-5 years and shut up shop because they say this will make GPU\'S obsolete (as they are used now). They\'ll probably just make there next gen gpus\' ray tracing enabled and also make them backwards compatible.(we can hope)
Comment by illF8d at 7:58pm 24th September 2007
"Cool^^ but we will never get to use this any time soon posible in five years or posible 2 if intel wishes to crush amd NOW!" ^ You're funny...AMD's got the Fusion coming up remember? This looks like it could be promising, probably what AMD's got in mind with the Fusion architecture... I'd still vote AMD though.
Comment by Negative_Sun at 6:12pm 24th September 2007
this looks good but no way can this take of in 2 years dx10 is still making ground only 2% of people with comps are dx10 ready and they expect in 2 years for everyone to get ride of their of their gpu\'s plus hows microsoft going to work this in to an opertaing system personaly i can see this being a flop like amd\'s 64bit
Comment by arm4g3don at 4:32pm 24th September 2007
i dont know much about computing, but would they be able to use GPGPU (in a way) to do this as well? or is cpu architecture much better for it?
Comment by wegreenall at 4:30pm 24th September 2007
Cool^^ but we will never get to use this any time soon posible in five years or posible 2 if intel wishes to crush amd NOW!
Comment by megapig at 3:42pm 24th September 2007
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