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View Full Version : NVIDIA Shows Interactive Ray Tracing On GPUs



EtienneK
18-08-2008, 07:08 PM
MojoKid writes

"During SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles, NVIDIA is demonstrating a fully interactive GPU-based ray tracer. The demo is based purely on NVIDIA GPU technology, and according to NVIDIA the ray tracer shows linear scaling during rendering of a complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application. The article reproduces screenshots from NVIDIA's demo. At three bounces (rays being traced as they bounce three times through a scene), performance is demonstrated at up to 30fps at HD resolutions of 1920x1080 for an image-based lighting paint shader, ray-traced shadows, reflections and refractions running on four next-generation Quadro GPUs in an NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing System."

Meanwhile reader arcticstoat passes on Intel's latest claim that rasterisation will die out the next few years, possibly in favour of ray tracing.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/15/142251&from=rss

Some screenies:

http://www.hothardware.com/newsimages/item7483/big_nvidia_rt_demo1.jpg

http://www.hothardware.com/newsimages/item7483/big_nvidia_rt_demo2.jpg

Coolhand
18-08-2008, 09:48 PM
Meh.

It doesn't look any better than standard rasterization. In fact, I'd say that the lighting is even "worse" (too washed out on the ground, too plasticky on the car) than stuff we've seen for years. Heck, a lot of PS2 games would look that good if they were rendered at 1920x1080 instead of 640x448 (a lot are actually 512x448 actually...).

The only nice thing to me would be full scene interactive reflections and such like in the building windows. But in a game, you don't even notice when that kind of thing is real and when it is fake if it is done correctly.

xyber
19-08-2008, 10:17 AM
oooh.. Bugatti Veyron

the reflections and refractions looks pretty good.

GeometriX
19-08-2008, 10:43 AM
Well, the only refractions I can see are those in the left-most headlight in the second screen. Would be nice if they showed a plate of dimpled glass in front of the car or something, to be honest.

Personally, I'm a little disappointed that they chose a car scene to demo the technology. Like, raytracing in-game is cool, no doubt, but if there's one type of game that proves you don't need raytracing to make things look good, it's racing games, as Coolhand pointed out. Seems a bit silly to me. Anyway, that's just a gripe I have with the demo. I'd like to see better environmental effects and some serious lighting. Stuff like what's above just seems to be pointed in completely the wrong direction.

Gazza_N
19-08-2008, 11:17 AM
Honestly, this seems more like they're punting the power of their hardware than the end result. "ZOMG OUR HARDWARE IS SO POWERFUL IT CAN DO RAYTRACING REAL-TIME OMG!!!". As Coolhand says, image quality is what matters in the end, so unless it can surpass existing raster renderers in that regard, there's no real point to it.