Intel ray traces Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Posted at: 3:14am 13th June 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Daniel Pohl shows off 16-core system running game at 16fps on 720p screen

Although it’s highly likely that Intel’s forthcoming Larrabee graphics processor is going to be mainly focused on rasterisation, rather than ray tracing, Intel is still pouring a lot of research and development funds into ray tracing. At its Research @Intel Day at The Computer History Museum, Intel has just demonstrated a ray-traced version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and at 720p too.

Former ray-tracing hobbyist turned Intel research scientist, Daniel Pohl, demonstrated the game on a 16-core 2.93GHz Xeon Tigerton system, which features four processors, each with four cores. This was able to run the game at around 16fps, which might sound sluggish, but is actually an amazing achievement for real-time ray tracing. The game engine shoots three million rays in every direction, so it requires some serious processing power.

The guys at Tom’s Hardware in the US saw the demo for themselves, and seem to be mightily impressed. Among the features they note were the demo’s ability to create effects such as physically correct water refraction on-the-fly, even if it’s unplanned. As well as this, the demo featured a 200-window portal, and detailed glass reflections of the whole environment. The demo was also run on a 64-bit Linux operating system, showing that if ray tracing was to become a standard in the future, then we wouldn’t necessarily need DirectX, and could run games on any OS we wanted.

Although Larrabee software engineer Tom Forsyth promised that Larrabee’s main focus was going to be rasterisation, ray tracing is clearly going to play a big part in Intel’s future graphics strategy. Intel’s chief technology officer, Justin Rattner, said at the Research@Intel day that ‘we believe a new graphics architecture will deliver vastly better visual experiences because it will fundamentally break the barrier between today's raster-based pipelines and the best visual algorithms.’ He also added that ‘our long term vision is to move beyond raster graphics which will make today's GPU technology outmoded.’