raytracing vs cinema 2.0

Intel talked up for a while about ratracing and how it will be the new thing.At hardocp there are some pictures of Nvidia showing raytracing( http://hardocp.com/news.html?news= [...] FzdCwsLDE= ).From what I see so far cinema 2.0 seems more realistic,( http://www.joystiq.com/2008/08/12/ [...] an-models/ ) with game developers already working with it.Your thoughts

Nice Buggati, but the Background SUCKS !!

The issue with most ray-tracing demos right now is usually they are single focused and don't show you the global environment, which is easier and they can use heavy light samples up frant and little for the back. It's obvious in that demo that the level of light sources and detail is far lower on everything but the centre item. If this were a raytracing demo worthy of note, then it would be realistic throughout like effects seen in movies that usually combine raytracing and raycasting to. Clear evidence of the size of the light samples in the background, the level of colour is flat throughout, not balanced for distance, and there's very little texture on them so sampling for AA and such is much easier.

These demos are like the shiny orbs of yester-year in 1993, but they didn't even become realtime screensavers until the late 90s early 2000, and we only recently have seen that level of realism in games, and still it's small chunks. Showing that they can do one car is no better than showing the shiny orbs demo from previous Siggraph or ATi lighting demo from a later one;



It's nice to see them working on it like intel and AMD, but until the level of background detail can come close to even DX9 games, it's still far from ready for prime time for anyone.
But it's more positive view than just a few months ago from their lead dev;
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=530
I guess buying RayScale helped them be a little more positive.

You don't need those last two since the computation engine doing ray-tracing could handle the physics, and CUDA and PhysX (bad fanboi Concrum, you need to do your homework and learn to spell your PR names) would simply be added processing overhead no-one needs not even nV.
And without an X86 option they're definitely not the solution anytime soon, until you can move people to something beyond Windows and OSX in numbers greater than 3%.