Ray tracing

"The quality of 3-D computer graphics is poised for a quantum jump forward, thanks to speedier ways to simulate the flight of light "

http://www.intel.com/technology/itj/...1_abstract.htm

"Ray tracing is something of a holy grail in graphics processing. By using standard optics equations to calculate the paths that light takes in a scene, a 3D renderer can produce scenes that are much more realistic than those produced by the kind of raster graphics that powers all 3D games and most computer-animated movies."

"I think it's reasonable to guesstimate that a four-core Conroe or Athlon 64 system would get you to the point where you could do real-time ray tracing at 450M raysegs/s or higher. This would put software-based real-time ray tracing well in reach of a God Box in late 2007, and a Performance Gaming Box not too long thereafter. These numbers also make me wonder if you couldn't do real-time ray tracing on a PS3, or even on an Xbox 360 (less concurrency than the PS3, but higher per-thread performance). "

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060805-7430.html

Examples:
http://img.zazzle.com/dzn/28EE2138-E...z1000_qt70.jpg

http://img.zazzle.com/dzn/F6B3C0F8-7...z1000_qt70.jpg


Man, I'm so psyched about this.

If it works as advertised, then we may actually have a very good thing in our hands.

If it works as advertised.

Looks good. It's amazing that they found a way to calculate it in real time.

I do hope games move away from looking like real life. After all, that's the one of the reasons why I play them.

There's a massive article about this in a recent... scientific american... or was it american scientist... I forget >_<

Anywho, there's actually a private company that's doing in-house development on a processing unit devoted to ray tracing, an RPU.
They're doing amazing work on it. It's gotten to something like 66mhz right now, and can render real time scenes.

I'm looking way more to having a dedicated unit than just having bolted on software.

ok i kno this is going to make me sound stupid asking this but

are those pics like computer generated or normal real pics

Oh? So how fares the PPU?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AKofC

Oh? So how fares the PPU?

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http://www.stoptazmo.com/showthread.php?t=14183

Sounds damn cool. I look forward to seeing it in action.

they generated