Ray tracing: Fixed-point or floating-point?

[No_Frills]

Would anybody here happen to know whether ray tracing uses fixed-point or floating-point math? This is speculative to the point of stupidity, but if real-time ray tracing is realized in the coming decade would it be offloaded to a CPU, and could that be the death knell for GPUs? Will graphics computation then fall upon Intel's and AMD's ALUs?

 

[Scooby2]

for raytracing you need Floating point. Your not going to see realtime raytracing on a CPU for a while yet. (at least not above really low quality)

 

[azerman]

This may be a stupid question, but why would anyone have to offload the ray-tracing calculations to a cpu(unless you mean separate core). I may be wrong, but I thought gpu's could do floating point calculations as well. GPU's are optimized for 3d rendering anyway, it's only a matter of time until they are powerful enough to do real time ray-tracing.