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Crytek Bashes Intel's Ray Tracing Plans
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Apr 11, 2008 08:58 AM
from the future-is-raysterization dept.
from the future-is-raysterization dept.
Vigile writes "Despite all good intentions, Intel continues to see a lot of its work on ray tracing countered not only by their competition, as you'd expect, but also by the very developers that Intel is going to depend on for success in the gaming market. The first major developer to speak on the Intel Larrabee and ray tracing debate was id Software's John Carmack, who basically said that Intel's current plans weren't likely to be implemented soon or ever. This time Cevat Yerli, one of the Crytek developers responsible for the graphically impressive titles Far Cry and Crysis, sees at least 3-5 more years of pure rasterization technology before moving to a hybrid rendering compromise. Intel has previously eschewed the idea of mixed rendering, but with more and more developers chiming in for it, it's likely where gaming will move."
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Vigile writes "As a matter of principle, when legendary game programmer John Carmack speaks, the entire industry listens. In a recent interview he comments on a multitude of topics starting with information about Intel, their ray tracing research and upcoming Larrabee GPU. Carmack seems to think that Intel's direction using traditional ray tracing methods is not going to work and instead theorizes that using ray casting to traverse a new data structure he is developing is the best course of action. The 'sparse voxel octree' that Carmack discusses would allow for 'unique geometry down to the equivalent of the texel across everything.' He goes on to discuss other topics like the hardware necessary to efficiently process his new data structure, translation to consoles, multi-GPU PC gaming and even the world of hardware physics."
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Hardware: Larrabee Team Is Focused On Rasterization 87 comments
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Students Evaluate Ray Tracing From Developers' Side 84 comments
Vigile writes "Much has been said about ray tracing for gaming in recent weeks: luminaries like John Carmack, Cevat Yerli and NVIDIA's David Kirk have already placed their flags in the ground but what about developers that have actually worked on fully ray traced games? PC Perspective discusses the benefits and problems in art creation, programming and design on a ray traced game engine with a group of students working on two separate projects. These are not AAA-class titles but they do offer some great insights for anyone considering the ray tracing and rasterization debate."
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Ray-Tracing Extremely CPU Intensive (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ray-Tracing Extremely CPU Intensive (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Ray-Tracing Extremely CPU Intensive (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone denies that ray tracing is lovely etc., but its a question of whether it is remotely feasible to do it on the current generation of CPUs or GPUs. If it takes a cluster of Cell processors (basically super fast number shovels) to render a simple scene you can bet we are some way off from it being viable yet.
Maybe in the mean time it is more suitable for lighting / reflection effects and is used in conjunction with traditional techniques.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I were to mention a number, I would either want at least ~72 frames per second (where the eye/brain would have a hard time discerning between individual frames) or at least match the sync of an ordinary LCD screen at 60 fps.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
you want at least 30 frames per second and even that isn't considered great by many gamers.
I've always wondered about the need for a solid 60 fps in every game. A lot of games, especially console games of late, are going for that cinematic experience, and as theatrical movies themselves run at 24 fps, maybe all it would take is today's prettiest graphics and a really sophisticated use of motion-blur to make a good game running at that mere 24 fps. Maybe for first-person shooters and racing games, you want that almost hyper-real 60 fps of unblurred, crystal clear action, but for those other actio
Re:Ray-Tracing Extremely CPU Intensive (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Ray-Tracing Extremely CPU Intensive (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Ray-Tracing Extremely CPU Intensive (Score:5, Informative)
Yes its not a 'wise decision', but not all decisions can be made based on whats most logical..sometimes you need to cut corners based on what will work fastest or easiest.
In quake your movespeed and your ability to move/accelerate in the air is based entirely on your fps. Some trick jumps can't be done without a certain framerate.
In quake3 that changes more into your jump height, but the same end result -- Some jumps require certain fps to become possible.
In any HL based game your ability to slide up a steep wall instead of slide down it is impacted by your fps (and also the servers framerate).
In TFC hwguy assault cannon and a few other weapons would fire more often with higher fps.
In Natural Selection(1.x) how quick your jetpack fuel replenishes is based on your fps. Enough FPS and you could fly forever.
Theres more, but the tl;dr version: Any game that uses quake's "player.think()" system to do calculations will fire off more
Parent
Re:Ray-Tracing Extremely CPU Intensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. Just the same as raster graphics, the amount of time you spend per frame on ray-tracing is adjusted to your needs and desires. Take, say, a Pixar film. Those are mostly done with raster graphics, with key effects done with ray-tracing. How much time do you reckon it takes to render each of one of those films' frames? (Pixar films are all drawn with Photorealistic Renderman, which is based on the REYES algorithm, which reads like a fancy raster engine)
The part about computational power is another fine display of complete misrepresentation of reality. Raster graphics are this fast nowadays for two major reasons. The most obvious is because graphics cards entire massively parallel processors specialized in drawing raster graphics. It's pretty damn obvious that, given two techniques for the same result, the one for which you use a specialized processor will always be faster, which doesn't produce evidence that a technique is inherently faster than the other. The second, less obvious, is that raster graphics have been the focus of lots of research in recent years, which makes it a much more mature technology than ray-tracing. Once again, a more mature technology translates into better results, even if the core technique has no such advantage. What Intel is supposedly aiming for here is getting the specialized hardware and mindshare going for ray-tracing, which might lead to real-time ray tracing becoming a viable alternative for raster graphics.
Parent
Stop motion movies (Score:4, Interesting)
Enter ILM and go motion [wikipedia.org]. Instead of filming static scenes, the clay was moved slightly during the shot to create a blurry frame. This blurry frame made the scene seem more realistic. The blur is what the eye picks up in the movie frame, so an actor walking in a scene is not a set of pinpoint focus shots but a series of blurs as the man moves.
Ray tracing is great for static scenes. But movement is the key to games that require this much detail, and so each frame should not be beautifully rendered framebuffers, but a mix of several framebuffers over the span of one frame. Star Wars did it great. Most computer games, not so much.
you've got it arse about face. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:you've got it arse about face. (Score:5, Interesting)
In the case of a company like Intel who's pushing a new technology, the developers are the customers. It's not Joe Consumer who's going to be buying into Intel's technology. (At least not until there are games that support it.) It's going to be the developers. Developers who will be taking a gamble on a next generation technology in hopes that they lead the pack. And as history has proven, the first out of the gate often earns the most money. (At least in the short term.)
Of course, history has also proven that new technologies often fail. Thus the risk is commiserate with the reward. There may be a lot to gain, but there is also a lot to lose. A lot of dollar signs, that is.
Parent
Re:First out of the gate? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. That dubious distinction belongs to Classmates.com, a site launching in 1995 that did quite well for itself and is still going strong. (Oddly.)
Neverwinter Nights, Ultima Online, and Everquest (nay, Evercrack!) were all highly successful and made their creators a lot of money in the short term.
Consider what? Ford went gangbuster when it released the Model T to the market. In the short term, Ford's assembly-line approach effectively handed them the market. Toyota and Honda weren't competitors for nearly 80 years!
Parent
The best person to ask? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The best person to ask? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So not an April fool then? (Score:3, Interesting)
why bash? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So why waste it on ray tracing which adds little benefit over current techniques when it could be spent on so many other things?
There are other ways of producing global illumination which is much faster then ray tracing. It's pointless because it's like taking a step back just because we can now bute force simple scenes.
Ray Tracing will still be slow on global illumination anyway. The more reflections you have the longer it takes, so it's not going to look as good
Well... duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep also in mind that Intel proposes this as a future way of doing rendering. Their hardware is not even here yet. Given this, any prediction below 3 years would be quite surprising.
Re:Well... duh! (Score:4, Informative)
The point of raytracing is that instead of having a 100,000 polygons cloth animation to raster, you could have a smoother result with about 1000 control points on a mathematical surface.
Today, game makers and modelers have the habit of breaking everything into triangles because of rasterization but the raytracing approach isn't limited to triangles; it can use any shape for which a collision with a ray can be computed. It is a very powerful approach but new tools have to be developed to use it to its full extent.
Parent
1. Consoles 2. ??? = Ray Tracing! 3. Profit? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with ray tracing, as Carmack said, is that it will always be much slower than raster-based graphics with a given amount of computing power. He pointed out that there's nothing impressive about Intel's demo of a game from two generations ago running sort of acceptably at moderate resolution on an overpowered Intel demo system. He said that they'll never be able to produce a ray traced engine competitive with the state of the art raster-based games, so the ray tracing, while technically satisfying, will in every case offer poor performance for inferior graphics.
All of this boils down to a time lag. If raster graphics can do something in 2008, ray tracing can do it in 2012, etc. What if raster graphics stopped progressing for four years? Then ray tracing would have a chance to catch up, perhaps leading to new engines and APIs based on ray tracing, which would ensure long term use.
But wait...raster graphics have already been at a standstill for two years, for the first time since their inception. When the 360 came out and then the 8800 line showed up to put it firmly in its technical place, gaming graphics capabilities suddenly stopped. Not only did nVidia have its first unassailable lead over ATI in a long time, but suddenly the PC gaming market finally showed very strong signs of finally dying. Most of the remaining PC game developers shifted development to consoles, leading to (again as Carmack pointed out) a stationary graphical hardware target for new games. The overall number of PC gamers managed to stay high, but literally almost all of them were playing World of Warcraft, which has very low graphics card requirements.
Now two years have gone by, and WoW still dominates PC gaming, while only a few games have shown up that really push current hardware, with few people buying them. It's a pity that the most graphically impressive game is also quite mediocre when it comes to gameplay. There's very little market pressure on nVidia outside of the small enthusiast community, and they've managed to milk a 4x hardware lead over consoles for an unprecedented length of time. The graphics card industry used to beat the living crap out of Moore's Law, but now they've managed to eek out a 10% improvement in over two years, which is just sad. The next generation parts may or may not be coming soon, may or may not bring a large performance boost, and may or may not have any software at all to really justify their purchase.
Going waaaaay back to the beginning, CPU speeds over this same time period have been keeping up with their normal exponential increase in power. At this rate, it would only take two more generations of PC gaming failure for ray tracing on the CPU to catch up with rastering on the GPU, and if that happens, it could end up going to consoles. Hell, it might even be good for PC gaming's health. Currently most console players have a PC, but with its Intel integrated graphics it's only suited to playing games from 6-8 years ago. Already those same PCs can probably match that with ray tracing. If games were only dependent on CPU speed, they'd be a lot more accessible and easily played by a much larger part of the population.
simplicity wins (Score:4, Insightful)
A word about raytracing purism. (Score:5, Interesting)
Further, raytracing cannot handle advanced refraction and reflection effects, like the surface of water causing uneven illumination at the bottom of a pool, or a bright red ball casting a red spot on a white piece of paper, without preemptive "photon mapping", which is another cheat.
In short, we have not been able improve upon the original raytracing algorithms without "cheating reality". Modern raytracing that includes photon mapping is a hybrid anyway. So the raytracing purists really have nothing to stand on until there's enough hardware to accurately calculate the paths of quadrillions of photons at high resolution sixty times a second. I'm not saying we won't get there, I'm saying probably not within this decade.
The reality is, the only advantage raytracing has over rasterization is its ability to compute reflection, refraction, and some atmospheric effects (e.g. a spotlight or a laser causing a visible halo in its path) with "physical" accuracy. The capabilities of rasterization have grown leaps and bounds since the 1960s, roughly linearly in proportion to available hardware.
Purists be damned. A hybrid of each technique utilizing what it's good at (raytracing for reflection, refraction, and atmospheric halos, rasterization for drawing the physical objects, "photon mapping" for advanced reflection and refraction effects) is likely the best approach here.