NVIDIA Doubts Ray Tracing Is the Future of Games [Slashdot]

[DP ServBot]

SizeWise writes "After Intel's prominent work in ray tracing in the both the desktop and mobile spaces, many gamers might be thinking that the move to ray-tracing engines is inevitable. NVIDIA's Chief Scientist, Dr. David Kirk, thinks otherwise as revealed in this interview on rasterization and ray tracing. Kirk counters many of Intel's claims of ray tracing's superiority, such as the inherent benefit to polygon complexity, while pointing out areas where ray-tracing engines would falter, such as basic antialiasing. The interview concludes with discussions on mixing the two rendering technologies and whether NVIDIA hardware can efficiently handle ray tracing calculations as well."Read more of this story (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/07/1659250&from=rss) at Slashdot.
http://rss.slashdot.org/~a/Slashdot/slashdotGames?i=C2T83n</img> (http://rss.slashdot.org/~a/Slashdot/slashdotGames?a=C2T83n)
http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotGames/~4/247513443

More... (http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotGames/~3/247513443/article.pl)

[diskoboy]

Actually, I've been praying for a real time ray tracing engine for years now. And I think they DO have a tremendous future. If you truly want photorealism in your games, ray tracing is the way to go.

NVIDIA (IMO) is wrong on this one.

[Berserker]

Actually, I've been praying for a real time ray tracing engine for years now. And I think they DO have a tremendous future. If you truly want photorealism in your games, ray tracing is the way to go.

NVIDIA (IMO) is wrong on this one.

+1 to all of that, diskoboy.

I find that trying to predict the future of technology is kind of a fool's game anyway. After all, 10 years ago what was the future then? Well, 3dfx would handle all of your 3d accelerated graphical needs, of course! Yeah.

[smork]

Ray tracing is a serious computational bitch. It's one of the techniques we use at work (oil exploration) and it just takes massive amount of parallel compute.

Don't know what it takes for computer graphics, but i'd imagine it's pretty serious there, too.

[j_factor]

Hasn't ray tracing been around since the 32-bit era?

[diskoboy]

Hasn't ray tracing been around since the 32-bit era?

It's been around for a while, but as Smork pointed out, it's a mathematical nightmare. It's primarily used in 3-D rendering software like 3d Studio Max and Lightwave. Using it to render in realtime would slow even the most powerful gfx cards to a snails pace.

If you've ever used that software, and turn on raytracing when rendering a scene, it adds more realism to the scene, but it takes alot longer to render - unless you have a rendering farm made of supercomputers.

It'll probably still be (At least) 4 or 5 generations before we see real time ray tracing.

[Ed Oscuro]

Ray tracing has been around as a theory since at least the 70s, in the dark ages of early 3D technique exploration.

I think there's a good case to be made that ray tracing doesn't do many things better than "faking it" can, but it seems to simplify how you deal with materials (instead of lots of faked effects you have a more realistic model with materials being treated as they actually would be by lighting), and it also offers the benefit of free, comprehensive physics detection (at least for stuff being rendered in the view area).

I thought AA isn't an issue, since you're already treating everything with a complex light simulation, but maybe I'm misunderstanding how AA works.

It goes without saying that nVidia has a good reason to try to downplay the benefits of ray-tracing, since they don't have the sort of general purpose CPUs that Intel has available to step into that space, and if they did try to they'd be bumping heads with Intel (and AMD), which doesn't seem like a winning proposition.

ATI is a unit with AMD at the moment, so they can really go wherever they need to.

[Rob2600]

I remember around 1999 when all of the video game magazines proclaimed NURBS to be the future.

Wikipedia - Nonuniform rational B-spline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurbs)