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RE: Ray Tracing

JamesW — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:59:49 GMT

I like the pic with wine glasses and dice. Superb.

For anyone who wants to play around with the deeper techy aspects of raytracing, povray and associated software is where I started an on/off career in 3D animation, back in the days when computers were driven by coal. I used to spend literally days waiting for a 486 to render a single picture, let alone an animation, and only came up with decent results by accident, but it was free and very educational.

3D Studio MAX and similar also have raytracing shaders, which are far easier to use and preview, but you won't learn as much - 3DS is more of a professional production tool, where povray can be pretty raw, but there are free third-party interfaces that make it easier to use.

It's highly technical and time-consuming, and the more CPU cores you have, the better, but povray is worth a look if you're that way inclined. I don't have the patience nowadays..

RE: Ray Tracing

Slipstreem — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:14:25 GMT

Thanks for the link, James. There are some truly stunning images there! I guess we'll just have to wait a decade or so until those stills become a viable moving image. :)

Cheers, Slipstreem. :cool:

RE: Ray Tracing

Teafie — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:51:15 GMT

Goodly points there James.

It does make you wonder what Intel have planned for laughabee.

The potential is unprecedented.

Also, if Intel offer the OEM makers handsome profit margins and in addition sell them at a loss or as best Intel can to get away with it.

Then laughabee should be taken up pretty darn quick and with it being x86 then if you have a nice flexible OS cornel that can easily be pushed in any direction (Linux)

Then its gonna come on in leaps and bounds.

Well thats what I think. watch this space.:D

RE: Ray Tracing

JamesW — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:03:50 GMT

There are some nice examples of still raytracing here:

http://hof.povray.org/

It was a thought-provoking article, but my guess is that raytracing won't hit a turning point where it suddenly takes over from conventional DX rendering and makes the DX API obsolete.

It's more likely, in my view, that raytraced shaders will run in conventional GPU pipelines, using later DX versions, and then only where the extra computational expense can be justified, either for surfaces that require complex shadow, reflection and refraction effects, or where there is sufficient processing power available to make it worthwhile without killing frame rates.

Ray tracing can be almost infinitely complex, depending on lighting, scene and object properties, so it does offer a way forward, but we're nowhere near having enough affordable GPU power to make it worth doing.

RE: Ray Tracing

Slipstreem — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:05:23 GMT

Does anywhere have any proper videos for viewing that haven't been mangled beyond all belief by Youtube? I'm only seeing 5+ year old ATI DX image rendering quality in any of these videos to be honest... or am I missing something really obvious? :ermm:

Cheers, Slipstreem. :cool:

RE: Ray Tracing

Teafie — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:29:33 GMT

Hmmm, yeah marks article was well good.

Reading between the lines I'm quietly confident that Intel can taste the Graphics crown with Laughabee.

It will all be in the hands of the software writers of course. There is sygnificantly more muscle gonna be locked up in the laughabee Via vertual cores which the nehalem will support.

My self I think laughabee is gonna be highly tangable to the nehalem.

why I can even see Intel moving the goal posts for the Laughabee to sit bang in the same board as a nehalem via a four socket paltform.

Raytracing here we come.

Although I hope it will be done a little better than those 2 crude PS3 examples.:)

RE: Ray Tracing

Spedley — Sat, 31 May 2008 19:10:43 GMT

I always forget about youtube.
14 cell processors shown here with 4xSuper Sampling at 720p, although it is quite a slow frame rate.

[url]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34ya8[/url]

Edit: even better, three PS3s (I think) with a ray(?)/raster algorithm [url]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=8B2-9rNBvIg[/url]. Looks much nicer!

RE: Ray Tracing

Teafie — Sat, 31 May 2008 18:41:18 GMT

Speds.

:):):):):):):):)

Just plain cool M8.:cool:

RE: Ray Tracing

Spedley — Sat, 31 May 2008 18:20:56 GMT

A good article this week. It does show taht it is possible if a Quad core CPU can ray trace Quake at 256x256@15fps. Many PS3/XBOX games are still 850x480@30fps (or at least played by a lot of people at that resolution) which is only just over 10x the power requirement.

It seems to me that the PS3 should be able to give acceptable results with the right software and possible even reach the 'intersection point' mentioned for ray-tracing vs rasterisation. This intersection point is probably a little lower for the PS3 because its processors are not tuned directly at rasterisation.

Anyway, a good read!

RE: Ray Tracing

JamesW — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 08:05:56 GMT

I'm not convinced that ray tracing and radiosity are quite the same thing. Radiosity is probably better described as a 'lighting model' or even a 'texture effect' that can be applied to ray traced scenes, but also to scenes rendered 'conventionally' (as seen in most 3D games).

The downsides of radiosity, and particularly of ray tracing, are their high computational expense compared to the extra eye-candy and realistic detail they can supply. There are some reasonably efficient radiosity algorithms for GPUs, but I have no idea what plans MS, AMD and NV have to support them. (I haven't really looked, to be honest)

Ray tracing (as the term is normally used) is very inefficient compared to current rendering algorithms, so I'd be surprised to see it showing up in force any time soon in commercial DX games, but developers already have the option of writing custom shaders (programs that run in pixel pipelines) that are effectively genuine ray tracers. They just don't bother to do it very often at the moment because there are easier ways to skin the same cat and it's likely to murder frame rates, particularly at higher resolutions. Its main use is in effects like accurate reflections and refractions, and reflections of refractions, and refractions of reflections of refractions etc etc. Nice glass and water effects, for example, but is it worth it?

Not sure if I've cleared that up, or just made it more confusing.

:blink:

RE: Ray Tracing

oldphart — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 01:09:59 GMT

Hmm. My 256k video card only does black and white...:)

RE: Ray Tracing

psychochief — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 01:05:03 GMT

errrrrrrrm thats what AMD/ATI are working on now isnt it spedders ?? :ermm:;)

Ray Tracing

Spedley — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:55:59 GMT

I really do think that now is the time for Ray-Tracing (Radiosity) to take over from current graphics cards.

Current cards rely on making object look like they are in a scene but with todays computing power it is possible to 'ray-trace' in real time so that the scene is more alive. i.e. it doens' have shadow maps etc because they are part of the scene. Objects reflect on each other, shadows are soft and the graphics process is the otherway around, the objects are put into a scene rather than the scene put onto objects.

Anyway, here are some demos I stumbled accross whilst looking for 3d fractals

[url]http://dee.cz/[/url] ... and, an old link which requires at least an ATI 9500 card! but doesn't require installation [url]http://dee.cz/rrb/RRBugs.rar[/url]