Ray tracing in games – we interview Intel’s Daniel Pohl

Posted at: 4:34pm 18th August 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Will graphics in games ever catch up with the ray-traced effects in today’s films? Could ray tracing ever catch on in mainstream gaming? We talk to Intel’s ray tracing expert, Daniel Pohl, to find out

Ray tracing is the big buzzword (or pair of buzzwords) when it comes to the future of PC gaming at the moment, and it could change gaming graphics forever if it really takes off. It wasn’t long ago that the idea of ray-tracing in real-time was so utterly ridiculous that you could compare it to the likeliness of Scrappy Doo becoming the next US President. However, Intel’s Daniel Pohl now says that he can get 20fps from a ray-traced version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, using a 16-core Xeon rig. Okay, so it’s not a mainstream gaming machine, but it’s a lot closer than a render farm that takes hours to produce a single frame.

As its name suggests, ray tracing is when a virtual ray of light is traced around a scene, with the computer calculating all the reflections, shadows and angles of incidence. It makes 3D scenes in films look incredibly realistic, particularly with regards to reflections. However, due to its phenomenal hardware demands it’s so far only really been used in the film industry, where a sequence can be rendered a frame at a time, but is this all about to change?

With Intel’s multi-core x86-based Larrabee graphics chip looming on next year’s horizon, and with Nvidia recently demonstrating its own GPU-based ray tracing system, we decided to catch up with Intel’s own ray-tracing aficionado, Daniel Pohl to find out what the future holds. This is the guy who ray-traced Quake III and Quake 4 as his own student research project, and his early work was even featured in Issue 11 of Custom PC back in 2004. Intel was so impressed with his work that the company decided to hire him. How did this all start, and what’s Intel’s vision for real-time ray tracing in games? Read on to find out.

CPC: How does it feel to go from the guy who ray traced Quake III for a personal project, to become the star of Intel’s graphics department? You must feel really pleased.

Daniel: The Quake III: Ray Traced project was done as my student research project before I ever knew that I would join Intel. The real star is the complete ray tracing team we have at Intel, which consists of world-class people putting together all the pieces of a very flexible and fast ray tracer with really stunning demos. So yes, I am happy with how things turned out.