During the past few years, ray tracing seems to have become the El Dorado of the real-time 3D world. The rendering technique sparked a peak of interest when a young researcher by the name of Daniel Pohl devoted a research project to the technology in 2004.
The reason the general public took an interest in his work is largely because Pohl chose to focus on id Software's famous Quake III, Quake IV, and Quake Wars 3D shooter game franchise. The researcher got a lot of media coverage and gamers began dreaming of a bright future in which their favorite titles would be ray traced and devoid of rasterization.
Intel soon became aware of the buzz and spotted an ideal way to justify increasing the number of cores in its processors. The company quickly started its own research program and now never misses an opportunity to remind us that ray tracing is the future of real-time 3D games. But is it, really? What technical realities lie behind the marketing hype? What are the real advantages of ray tracing? Can we really expect it to replace rasterization? We'll try to provide some answers to those questions.


Anyway, what I liked about this article is its being under the hood, but not related to a new product, announcement or such.
"deep tech" articles accompanying product launches tend inevitably to follow the lines of press kits, PR slides, etc.
Articles like this, while take longer to research, are exactly that - they are researched rather than detailing "company X implemented techniques Y and Z in their new product, which works this way, benefits performance that way and is really cool.". it gives an independent, comprehensive view of the subject, and gives the reader real understanding in the field.
Okay, well in real life, the Half Life 2 buggy would be a lot cooler to drive around than a Jetta, but you get the analogy.
there are a lot of diminishing returns i can see in the future, some are, how complex can rasterization can get? what is the diminishing returns for image resolution especially on the desktop/living room?
ray tracing has a lot of room for optimization.
for years to come, indeed, raster is good for what is possible in hardware. look further ahead,more than 5 years, we'll have hardware fast enough and efficient algorithm for ray tracing. not to mention the big cpu companies, amd & intel, who will push this and earn everyones money.
Anyway, what I liked about this article is its being under the hood, but not related to a new product, announcement or such.
"deep tech" articles accompanying product launches tend inevitably to follow the lines of press kits, PR slides, etc.
Articles like this, while take longer to research, are exactly that - they are researched rather than detailing "company X implemented techniques Y and Z in their new product, which works this way, benefits performance that way and is really cool.". it gives an independent, comprehensive view of the subject, and gives the reader real understanding in the field.
I still never read of any dedicated ray-tracing hardware, at any price. It seems the better we understand ray-tracing and it's limitations, the more cloudy the future becomes.
Heh... this article brought to you by Nvidia.
will make raytracing possible.
(Together with a huge number of processing cores per graphic card and an advanced raytracing algorithm.)
I wouldn't mind having just a little bit more technical depth, but I'd be glad to seem more like this on Tom's.
if nvidia wants to survive it must adapt and evolve. It's silly trying to persuade people about how bad raytracing is just because you're a dinosaur and don't want to acquire new know-how. Nevertheless even if nvidia is not willing to do it, there are already others who are filling the gaps.
Yep we will see real time ray trasing in games in something like 20 years? (Douple the speed of computer in each year) It takes something like 15 years to calculate one frame in 0.6 second (for movie company computers) and 4-5 year more to make it 24 frames per second... If the mores law keep on kicking. For home you can expect speed like that in 5 more years? lets say 10. So summa summarum we have high guality tray trasing games 30 years from now!
Well ofcourse Pixar has much higher need for guality, so less is needed for gaming.
In any way nice article! And in real life some sort of tray trasing can be seen sooner, but photorealistic computing is still far far away... pity I will be in pension or dead before I see it...
Great job Fredi, and tho some will deny what its going to take to get RT RT, you painted it as well as Ive seen. As for more in depth,if the article was too finely explained, the overall picture may have been lost, as seen by some comments.
I cant find the link I posted awhile back in the forums about Lexus? having a full time raytracer for their designing, but its still slow, and requires over 320 cores which are designed for this kind of work, not just a simple x86 cpu, so yea, we are aways off before anything real happens.
Once again, excellent article
Rasterization is still the better method. Besides, a decade ago, Doom3 proved you could do dynamic shadows in rasterization, which skeptics thought was too costly to perform (or downright impossible). Reflections will eventually follow.
Add on top of that the processing power needed to reach such levels at this time is just not economically smart. In time when average people can afford a system capable of rendering such games then it would make sense but only to the point in which our senses can actually distinguish whats on the screen.
Think of Film Noir and the very effective use of darkness an shadows. What you don't see contrasts what you do.
Remember the brighter the light source the DARKER the shadow.
If you are in bright sunlight (Fallout3) the shadows casts by objects and characters should be BLACK to you. This is because your iris is closed because of the sunlight. IT seem that something so simple is hard to pull off with rasterized rendering.