With 8 Cards, Wolfenstein Ray Traced 7.7x Faster 97
An anonymous reader writes "As Slashdot readers know Intel's research project on ray tracing for games has recently been shown at 1080p, using eight Knights Ferry cards with Intel's 'Many Integrated Core' architecture. Now a white paper goes into more detail, documenting near-linear scaling for the cloud setup with 8 cards, and gives details on the implementation of 'smart anti-aliasing.' It will be interesting to see how many instances of Intel's next MIC iteration — dubbed Knights Corner, with 50+ cores — will be required for the same workload."
and yet (Score:3, Insightful)
it honestly looks like an old game to me, yes there are some impressive features, but I really have to look for them in the images, something that is not going to happen at 60Hz (and if its not running at real speed who cares, that is a movie which can take its sweet ass time rendering frame by frame)
Re:and yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the current generation of ray traced game engine demos. They're poor looking. Apart from the metal sphere floating above the water and the odd glass refraction effect.
You'd think that they could hack something impressive looking together, particularly as they are competing against whatever it is the next generation of polygon rendering will come up with.
Re:Nice scaling (Score:5, Insightful)
Spot on! ION was the best thing that ever happened to the Atom platform. Really, it was the only thing that made it into a usable HTPC or ultra-low-power desktop. They really need to stop shitting down NVidia's throat because they are precisely the kind of aggressive, performance-driven company that would fit alongside Intel's model.
Re:Nice scaling (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with these demos is, they use ray tracing like we did in 1980 (i.e. Whitted style). All computations are highly coherent and efficient. As soon as you want to have more natural rendering, with diffuse illumination etc. Parellization doesn't scale proportionally anymore. Rays become heavily incoherent, memory access scatters and you get cache misses etc. So the real feat would have been if tey show 7.7x speed with diffuse global illumination.
Re:and yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Rent the Pixar Shorts DVD and watch what they did before Toy Story 1. Red's Dream, Tin Toy and Andre'B are all pretty crappy looking short films that demonstrate what a couple of guys in a lab could do at the time - when viewing them, you're supposed to imagine what could be done by a larger studio with funding, not bash them because a couple of guys in a lab given 3-6 months aren't producing something competitive with hundreds of people given millions of dollars and a couple of years.