Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced 184
An anonymous reader writes "After showcasing Quake Wars: Ray Traced a few years ago, Intel is now showing their latest graphics research project using Wolfenstein game content. The new and cool special effects are actually displayed on a laptop using a cloud-based gaming approach with servers that have an Intel Knights Ferry card (many-core) inside. Their blog post has a video and screenshots."
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, this project is simply here to validate itself.
I don't know if that's entirely true though. Carmack talks of slowly integrating raytracing technology into videogames. This research into raytracing in games could prove useful later in videogame development. As I understand most advancements in videogame visuals today are optimizations on old research. So I wouldn't rain on their parade entirely.
Poor ray tracing (Score:2, Interesting)
-The player does not appear in the scope reflection (but his shadow does).
-The people's shadows are cast in a different direction than the car's.
Project Offset (Score:5, Interesting)
Anybody know what happened to http://www.projectoffset.com/ [projectoffset.com] ? They released tons of killer videos showing an amazing game concept, outstanding real-time effects [youtube.com]... then Intel buys them and... nothing!
Ironic (Score:3, Interesting)
That none of intels graphics processors have any hope in hell of real time ray tracing.
fps counter lying? (Score:3, Interesting)
Chandelier part displays 40 fps on top right, but you can clearly see on the screen that its more like 15. Not to mention unimpressive difference between RT and normal renderer. I was expecting something more real life.
That's... Lovely. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yawn. Wake me up when they get refraction working with a playable framerate like Source had seven years ago. Regarde [youtube.com]
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
There is no point now. But in 10 years (maybe faster) the cpu speeds has increased to the point that you don't need a high performance cluster. It would be nice if you can at that moment run a game without an advanced GPU. in full detail.
If you have to start research about raytracing when the hardware is cheap enough you are too late.
And as for quality: fun of a game has little to do with grpahics quality. But it has to advance, or else we still would be looking at pong like graphics. people buy 1080p tv at sizes where it almost impossilbel to see the difference with 720p. But they still want the best quality.
PS, when they speak of wolfenstein i still think of the 1991 prequal to doom that was playable on a 286.
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Just thinking about the bandwidths is interesting. Start with 150E6 rays per second. Assume that to traverse the binary space subdivision data structures takes, say, 256 bytes, along with another 256 bytes worth of data for the polygon. That requires ~77 gigabytes/s memory bandwidth, sustained. So in practice you need the bandwidth of 6 fastest DDR3 sticks. And your algorithms better kept the CPUs pipelines full, and did proper prefetching, or else cache misses will have you for a day's worth of meals.