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Next-Gen 3D Rendering Technology: Voxel Ray Casting
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Table of contents
- 1 – Introduction
- 2 – A Little Bit Of History
- 3 – The Technologies
- 4 – Octree And Ray Casting
- 5 – The Advantages Of Sparse Voxel Octrees
After our coverage of ray tracing a little while back, let’s continue our overview of the rendering techniques that could replace, or at the very least, complement triangle rasterization as we know it today.
As those who read our previous article already know, we aren’t really convinced of the viability of ray tracing in real time (Ed.: this would seem to be backed up by Intel's recent demonstration of Larrabee ray tracing Enemy Territory at mediocre frame rates). That opinion would also seem to be held by most developers of video games, including one of the celebrities of the gaming world, John Carmack. Here’s what he told our colleagues at PC Perspective:
“I think that ray tracing in the classical sense, of analytically intersecting rays with conventionally defined geometry, whether they be triangle meshes or higher order primitives, I’m not really bullish on that taking over for primary rendering tasks, which is essentially what Intel is pushing. There are large advantages to rasterization from a performance standpoint and many of the things that they argue as far as using efficient culling technologies to be able to avoid referencing a lot of geometry, those are really bogus arguments because you could do similar things with occlusion queries and conditional renders with rasterization. Head to head rasterization is just a vastly more efficient use of whatever transistors you have available.”
If John Carmack doesn’t seem all that excited about ray tracing, it’s not because he’s unusually conservative and wants to see triangle rasterization remain the unchallenged rendering technique. As reported here a year ago, John Carmack has his own idea of the future of real-time rendering, and it involves voxel ray casting. Since then, we’ve seen Jon Olick’s presentation at SIGGRAPH, and many details have been leaked. So it’s time to take a closer look at what id Software has in store for us.
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... the 'matrix' is near... by this rate of progress...
This stuff is pretty interesting but a little over my head. The only thing I really care about is when we will start seeing this in our games.
This technology sounds a TON more promising than Ray tracing.
Damn! That's what I just wanted to start investigating. They'll beat me up even before I start again! I guess I'll never be a pioneer!
This is awesome, the people that can really gain something here are amateur filmmakers that can't afford the giant rendering farms big studios have!
This is awesome, the people that can really gain something here are amateur filmmakers that can't afford the giant rendering farms big studios have!
I meant independent, not amateur. Sorry.
personally i like raytracing, except for the performance issues. if you've ever tried doing a little 3d rendering, ray tracing is very good, makes things look very real if done properly. again i know it is slow
Very interesting stuff, I do understand how limiting cubes or voxels can be limited in terms of depth and height(same height per distance) as polygons have that advantage where the triangle gives us just that, an angle that can be measured in terms of height and distanve. We have a vanishing point with a triangle as well.....
Iwonder if they can impliment both polygons and advanced cubes with different sizes for the initial layers creating a more fluid and complexed scenario or landscape........
Interesting but voxels will have some extreme performance and space constraint hurdles to overcome before they become the main rendering of any game. I just downloaded a small demo http://www.advsys.net/ken/voxlap/voxlap03.htm its a little over 500K for the whole works but after you hit the genall batch file (it speeds up loading) the thing occupies about 120MB's of space for this simple game. Something like Quake 3 would have been a multi DVD file...
Pretty cool stuff.
Better put off upgrading my computer... again
In the regular resolution 12x12 you get 144 cells instead of 122 as stated in the text
Based on John Carmack's record if he says it is bad... you should do it, seeing as anyone with a memory will recall the time he said multi-core was a waste of time and we should continue the Ghz race (even those the Ghz race achieved Moore's Law).
John Carmack is a dinosaur and will try any new technology if paid enough (see his changing his mind on multi-core to "help" on the xbox 360).
Please get an expert that isn't a moron.
“pixel” is a fusion of the terms “picture” and “element,”, learned something new.
But i wouldn't want destructible walls. How am i going to camp when all the walls are gone?
Since when does a tree have attached children?
It's unfortunate that the example of MRI scan example was used. Medical software must avoid the habit of naming branches in tree structures as children, lest an error message is displayed accidentally to a patient such as "Out of memory allocating children, child process aborted." Which would be a lawsuit if scanning a pregnant female. But this bad coding practice is quite common.
@manwell999 : lawl
anyone with a memory will recall the time he said multi-core was a waste of time and we should continue the Ghz race
Well, back in the day, everyone was talking about higher GHz as the solution to everything. Even Intel did:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquire [...] 15ghz-2010
"LUCKY PUNTERS WILL BE ABLE TO BUY 15GHZ INTEL CHIPS, containing a billion transistors, by the end of the decade, said Pat Gelsinger, Intel veep and CTO in his keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in Tokyo today. Gelsinger also predicted that PDAs will hit 5GHz in the same timeframe. It's unlikely the chips will use the existing Pentium 4 architecture which is reckoned to only be good up to around 10GHz. "
Then Intel hit the thermal/power wall some time in 2004-2005, before even making it to 4 GHz. This of course signaled the end of such optimism. If that hadn't happened, higher clock speeds would still have been the best way to make faster CPUs. That makes all code run faster, not just code that is carefully optimized to extract parallelism. Multi-core CPUs for desktops and laptops initially came around not because it was the best choice for improving performance, but because it was not possible to further increase clock speed.
Here's what I saw.
That example should give you an intuitive idea of one of the advantages of using trees.
What happened to Normal Mapping?
What happened to Normal Mapping?
Hmmm maybe using a skin of voxels on top of a polygon mesh would be good for facial animation stuff, that sounds interesting to me or a mesh of polygons on top of the voxels for deformation purposes. Ok my mind is officially fried you may all proceed to LOL at me