With any luck this will take the same path as Physx...and be bought out by a graphics card maker, to have the API be implemented into graphic cards.

or even better, have parts of the e card integrated into a GPU

Watch this space, ray tracing is on its way, this may not be the definitive product, but its a starting point and one which is very welcomed.

As all our components get faster we step closer to the power unleashed by ray tracing and the level of detail and realism it can provide in many applications from image manipulation to movie production and gaming especially

Watch this space, ray tracing is on its way, this may not be the definitive product, but its a starting point and one which is very welcomed.

As all our components get faster we step closer to the power unleashed by ray tracing and the level of detail and realism it can provide in many applications from image manipulation to movie production and gaming especially

"Apple Engineers"

Would you buy a Dell-design GPU? Or a Microsoft-developed CPU?
As far as computer hardware is concerned Apple engineering seems like kind of a joke. All that Apple does for computers is make an OS to load into existing equipment made by hardware companies (Intel, nVidia, etc). Apple doesn't even manufacture the iPod, that's at least assembled by HP, and I wouldn't be surprized if they designed the hardware too, and Apple just made a pretty mobile OS to run the device.

Crack open any Apple case and have a look at apple's engineers. You think software guys came up with the macbook air? Apple designs everything they make, but yes you are sorta correct, they don't manufacture it.

You need to read a little more. Your entire post is a waste of time.

Help me guys, Ray-tracing is another form of processing graphics, but the quality is what, better then the conventional? but requires so much more processing power? Is there really a huge diff between the two? because the vids i've seen it just shows reflections which is already being done on the conventional.. i'm not sure what to see here

i'm willing to bet this will be like a repetition of the Physx story.

Sacre,
ray tracing generates very realistic lighting. Rendering techniques such as global illumination, final gathering, sub surface scattering, caustics, all are products of ray tracing.

Sounds interesting

Sounds interesting, games haven't improved much in graphics since Mafia the game(2002), they're all just too flashy but nothing improved really, hope this raytracing technology will really improve game graphics.

I remember reading about a ray tracing board years ago designed by a US univerisity. I think it was running at 90 MHZ. Wonder what happened to that?

I work with ray tracing quite a bit, doing it real time would be quite a feat, even though there was that Quake 4 demo with Ray Tracing.

I disagree.

At what resolution would the Ray tracing be real time? What is a real time fps , 24, 30 60?
If 2 cards were placed in a pc would it be twice as fast?

That's a silly question, it would all depend machine. Intel had a machine that was running Quake 4 using real time raytracing.

This is a good example of the effects of raytracing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKqZKXwop5E

raytraced:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showth [...] 1&t=654983

not raytraced:

http://www.wiinewsdaily.com/wp-con [...] rtwork.png

I agree that raytracing is the future, but it's important to note that the above rendering is not real time. I'm sure we will see this adopted and slowly implemented but don't expect to see it in the PS4 or the Xbox 720 or the Nintendo Pii. Maybe in 2 generations.

I remember back in elementry school hearing about this....20 years ago and I was astounded that it wasn't a real picture. Sucks it's taken this long.

I'll bet money we'll see it next generation. The PS3 can already do real time ray tracing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLt [...] re=related

This video is a bit of overkill, as the model is extremely high poly ("75x more complex then those used in today's games" according to the description) and they're 4x multi-sampling the image.

Intel already has a system that can do real time raytracing aswell:
http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/co [...] 5-113.html

realtime raytracing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34ya8

I'm not saying it can't be done as they're demonstrating it is, but while the potential is there, the rt rendering is not visually impressive right now even if the technology is. I just think the adoption will be slow. First you need the hardware, and then the games to support it. It will come but I'm guessing integration will take longer than 2010.

Just being realistic.

Wow! Check out the 2nd link that is amazing! Now I can't wait for real time Ray tracing to go mainstream.

2010? Hardware?

The point is, this generation can do it, the next will do it better. Dedicated hardware isn't necessary so I don't understand why you brought that up, and I don't see the relevance of 2010 much either. Most experts agree that this console generation is going to last a bit longer than previously thought. I doubt the PS4 would come out 4 years after the release of the PS3.


Good job at posting a video I posted right above you.

They just prove their technology, and allow intel, amd or nVidia to buy them out like happened with physX. Then we will have one add in card, video, or it will be included in chip for intel.

What is this article about? A dedicated raytracing card.
Hardware. And of course the hope that nVidia and Ati integrate this into their card offerings.
2010 is Caustic's projection to increase speeds by 200x.

This is what I was talking about.

The point is it takes more power to get this done and for it to hit mainstream you really need to make a machine dedicated to the tech. And it it's taking a whole lotta power to make rt graphics that look as good as stuff we saw in games back in 2003.

Ultimately it's potential is superior. Yes I agree with you, but I don't think the next batch of games and consoles are going to use raytracing. Obviously you disagree and that's cool but from my experience with tech it's going to take time to hit mainstream.

20x 200x in reference to what? CPU only raytracing? If yes which CPU specifically? If CPU + GPU what are the chips used? Will 200x = 60fps@1920x1080? Please give details that matter.

I've never understood why people even use the term 'realtime'
for raytracing. If a particular hw solution achieves a framerate
X for a given scene, then double the complexity of that scene
and bam, the framerate collapses. Scenes that benefit from
raytracing are all too often of a nature that can make the scene
complexity much worse very easily, eg. extra reflection levels and
transparency, or add another sphere or two. See my SGI Alias benchmark
for an example of such a scene.

Increase the resolution, or demand a greater level of reflections,
or whatever other parameter, and whatever was 'realtime' before
is reduced to a crawl. My C-Ray benchmark is another good example (check the sphfract model). The only way
to bring the framerate back up to interactive levels is to add
more hardware, which is how SGI did it, eg. the Boeing 777
interactive Manta system: 350 million polygons in the model
(that's 2 orders of magnitude more complex than a typical PC
game today), 'real-time' ray-traced/rendered with a 128-CPU SGI
Prism (112 x Itanium2s used for the raytracing), working on a
66GB dataset (the system has 256GB RAM).

Also, raytracing is good at rendering certain types of surfaces
and scenes, but not others. Remember the overall look of the
original PS2 Mercenaries game? Raytracing would be bad for that
sort of thing. As I understand it, raycasting is a better method
(if I recall the name correctly), offering a more general approach.

Atm though, I don't see how they can resolve the all-too-easy
potential for exponentially more complex processing that
raytracing involves without just adding more hardware. The
raster method offers so many ways of controlling the gfx loading,
including methods that have not yet been added to consumer cards
such as Dynamic Video Resizing (used in SGI's IR hw).

Modelling the world with polygons is fast for good reasons. I would
be more impressed with the development of an entirely new API
and hw for modelling natively volumetric things without using
polygons (thus ditching all the tradeoffs using polygons involves),
such as fire, smoke, fog, water, flames, mud, lava, sand, etc.
As mentioned above, SGI did this with IR4 gfx and the *Ray sw
from the Univ. of Utah (demos showed effects being done at a
performance level equivalent to more than a thousand GF cards of
the day), but it went nowhere after that AFAIK. Here's another reference
with more details, and the original Utah press release page with
some example images from the real-time demos. For the lazy, here
are direct links to the screenshots:

http://www.sci.utah.edu/stories/20 [...] ngroom.jpg
http://www.sci.utah.edu/stories/20 [...] museum.jpg
http://www.sci.utah.edu/stories/20 [...] cience.jpg
http://www.sci.utah.edu/stories/20 [...] galaxy.jpg
http://www.sci.utah.edu/stories/20 [...] lantis.jpg

and remember this was all done in 2002. The *Ray software was
shown to scale linearly, even on an Origin system with 1024 CPUs.

If they can come up with a decent product that has some sensible
useful lifespan, great, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Now if we had quantum computing all sorted, that would be a
whole different ballgame...

Ian.

Why is it that every bloody raytracing game/demo known to man HAS to have the free-floating bunch of 'quick-silvery reflective balls'? Is it an obligatory clause in the Raytracing Demo Production Coalition's charter or something? [http://www.idfun.de/temp/q4rt/screenshots/reflect02.jpg] And why is everything always coated in liquid metal? [http://www.theinquirer.net/img/7853/q4rt.jpg] YAAAY, **applause** raytracing provides MARVELOUS LOOKING REFLECTIONS!! Which we've known that since the 1991, when every BBS sys-op was shovelin' out jpegs of ray-traced trains--showing what the future of graphics was gonna look like... Tenor77's absolutely right: you people are dreamin' if you think the nextgen systems are going to be generating full-on, real-time rendered, fully raytraced games at decent framerates with graphics that look anywhere near as good as the current gen's rasterized offerings.

And why in god's name does everyone keeps posting that bloody 2 year old video of THREE ps3s generating ONE--a car, I might add, that looks about a quarter-step up in quality from a Need For Speed: Most Wanted vehicle--with background scenery about as detailed and textured as a throwback Jaguar 64 game, like it's some smokin'-gun, slam-dunk, WMDs-in-the-sand evidence that we're going to be seeing actual decent looking fully playable raytraced console games in 2 years?? Really??? Especially when the state of the economy pretty much indicates the PS4 is likely gonna be an 8th-thread-unlocked, die-shrunk PS3 Cell with a hair more system ram and a 'more advanced' graphics solution (and knowing nVidia, assuming they're allowed to stick around, said solution will be based solidly on the G92)...

Y'know... I love the beauty of quality raytracing and I honestly hope I'm proven wrong... but I seriously doubt I will be...

When was the last time Apple manufactured a Processing Unit? Yes, I do believe they design boards, and layout of components and cases, etc. But to my knowledge they have never produced a GPU, CPU, PPU, or anything of the sort. They've used ATI, Intel, Nvidia, IBM, etc chips and manufactured boards to support them. You really think Apple engineers have even tried a silicon die for processing?

Why in the world would they approach ray tracing the way the did. Just convert the raytracing rendering engine to run via CUDA. Problem solved...real time raytracing. Send me the source code for it and I'll do it. Their is no need for a special card to offload anything. Their is no need for Open GL api's either.

On a different note, Worlds rendered with ray tracing will take very little storage space. You can have an entire world with textures and details described in a file that could probably fit on a floppy disc still. The only large part (in my experience) for ray tracing is if you have textures mapped....all the procedure textures and geometry take very little space to describe.

This may have already been said I didn't read all the comments...dont have time right now.

FYI anything that claims realtime raytracing is cheating the algorythms in one way or another

Nice to see engineers working on stuff. Please follow up when then have something.