Back to the OP... Wow I am really impressed with the performance the article speaks of with the 4870. Ray-tracing in Real-time and holding 60 fps with AA, not trying to act like an ATI fan boy or anything, it is just very impressive to me.
As someone who renders in Maya a lot, I thought we were still years away from that kind of performance. Just goes to show how powerful these cards are getting. Just wonder if we can get our hands on the software that interfaces with DX9, I doubt it but it is cool technically all the same.
I have no idea what ray tracing is lol
Ray tracing can achieve a very high degree of realism, near as we can currently get to photo realistic with current technology. However Real time Ray-tracing is normally very slow and was something that was unheard of recently, even so you were talking about graphic computers with multiple gpu's and multiple processors.
For some comparison (even if it is a bit different) on June 12, 2008 Intel demonstrated real-time ray-tracing with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars running in basic HD (720p) resolution (same resolution as the Transformer Trailers), ETQW operated at 14-29 frames per second. The demonstration ran on a 16-core (4 socket, 4 core) Tigerton system running at 2.93 GHz. I would like to see what the 4870 could do with that demo.